Noor Uddin owaisi in Balapur, Andhra Pradesh, India MIM will contest polls in Delhi, UP, Bihar, J’khand The Owaisi-led party won two Assembly seats in Maharashtra, Akbaruddin Owaisi being greeted by Muslims in Mumbai after his party won two Assembly seats. The All India Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) is readying to contest the Assembly elections in Delhi, Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, buoyed by its performance in the just concluded Maharashtra Assembly elections. In Maharashtra, the MIM, which is headed by the Owaisi brothers, Asaduddin and Akbaruddin, won two Assembly seats out of the 24 it contested, and finished second in three seats and third in nine. This performance even surprised its own leaders. Suddenly they found that the MIM has become the choice of the Muslim youth in Maharashtra and elsewhere who view the Owaisi brothers as champions for their cause. Overnight, MIM has become the darling of Muslims all over the country. We are getting requests from all the states and there is tremendous response from not only Muslims, but also Dalits from across the country. Very soon, we will become a true all India party, MIM president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi told The Sunday Guardian. Owaisi confirmed the opening of his party office in Lucknow next month as apparently there is a huge demand for fielding a large number of candidates for the 2017 Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. Before that, the Owaisis would be launching offices in Bihar and Jharkhand which go to the polls early next year. There are also plans to field MIM candidates for the Delhi Assembly, when elections are held there. Owaisi, who held a review meeting with the senior leadership of the MIM, including his brother Akbaruddin, felt the need for stretching his resources to match the demand for expansion. His phone is busy ringing as calls come from far and wide — Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Karnataka. One major reason for the sudden surge in MIMs popularity is the absence of an all India party for Muslims or a credible leadership. Moreover, the shrinking of the Congress as a national party and the disappearance of a secular platform too call for bigger role, said Syed Amin Jafrin of MIMs think-tank. The partys senior leadership foresees a scenario where Muslims from all across the country will be looking for their own political party, instead of either backing the Congress or the Samajwadi Party, BSP or others. Till now there has not been any youthful and aggressive Muslim leadership like the Owaisis, Mohammad Majid, an MIM ideologue told this newspaper. While, Asaduddin, the party president is seen as a moderate face, Akbaruddin is projected as an aggressive leader fighting for the so- called Muslim cause. In fact, Akbaruddins primary claim to fame was the hate speech for which he was arrested by the Hyderabad police on 7 January 2013. The police produced video tapes that showed Owais junior threatening a bloody war in the country, if 25 crore Muslims were allowed a free hand even for a single day. MIM, which currently has 7 MLAs in the Telangana Assembly, all from Old City of Hyderabad, and one MP from Hyderabad, is poised for a bigger role. There has been flurry of activity at the MIM headquarters at Darussalam in the Old City, near Charminar, as Muslim intellectuals and activists from all over the country are visiting it since the Maharashtra Assembly results. The MIM was founded in 1926 as a pro-Nizam party. It gained notoriety after it, under the leadership of Qasim Rizvi, led an armed campaign in 1947-48, first for merging the then Hyderabad state in Pakistan and later for keeping it independent. However, Rizvis milita, Razakars, were crushed by the Indian Army in a military action in September 1948. The present MIM was revived by Abdul Wahed Owaisi and his son Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi in the late 1960s as a welfare party of Muslims. Salahuddin Owaisi began winning Assembly seats in the Old City from the 1960s. But the party emerged stronger after he won the Hyderabad Lok Sabha seat in 1984. Since then, the Hyderabad LS seat has never gone out of the party......
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 16:47:19 +0000