The party has been active in UP since the 2020 Bihar elections, where it surprised many by winning five seats. For the upcoming elections, the party has formed a “third front”, the Bhagidari Parivartan Morcha, along with the Jan Adhikar Party led by former UP minister Babu Singh Kushwaha and the Bhartiya Mukti Morcha headed by Waman Meshram.
The AIMIM, which is likely to contest around 100 seats, has so far announced candidates on 66 seats, most of them with a sizeable population of Muslims.
In the run-up to the election, Owaisi, an MP from Hyderabad, has been a regular visitor to the state, holding meetings with several senior Opposition leaders, including SBSP chief Om Prakash Rajbhar, Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party chief Shivpal Yadav and Azad Samaj Party chief Chandrashekhar. The talks, however, didn’t materialise.
In almost all his speeches so far, Owaisi has hit out at both the BJP and the SP, inviting the oft-repeated charges of the AIMIM being the “B-team of the BJP” for cutting into the Opposition’s minority votes.
In September, Owaisi had hit out at the SP chief, saying “when the Muzaffarnagar riots happened, if Akhilesh Yadav [as CM] had started the cases, the Yogi government would not have been able to withdraw the 77 cases”.
He has also repeatedly said that the SP doesn’t want an “independent leadership of Muslims in UP”.
A senior AIMIM leader said the party is hopeful of putting up a “tough fight” on at least 10 seats in the state. “The seats are spread across the state,” he said, naming Nanpara in Bahraich, Ruadauli in Ayodhya, Domariyaganj in Siddharth Nagar district, Saharanpur Dehat, Sahibabad in Ghaziabad and Siwal Khas in Meerut as some of the seats where it sees a fighting chance.
While the party is still finding its feet in the state, Owaisi’s popularity went up during the anti-CAA protests in December 2019. While Owaisi’s fiery speeches make him a natural crowd puller, it remains to be seen if he can convert this popularity into votes this election.
The party made its debut in UP in 2017, when it contested 38 seats and lost all of them with an overall vote share of 0.24 per cent. Its best performance that election was in Sambhal, where its candidate Ziaur Rehman came third with 59,336 votes, behind the BJP’s Dr Arvind (59,976 votes) and the SP’s Iqbal Mehmood (79,248 votes). The AIMIM had also won 23 zila panchayat member seats in the panchayat polls held last year.
While the AIMIM has little to lose in UP, if the party does end up doing well, it will be at the cost of the SP, which relies on its Muslim-Yadav votebank to see it through.
A senior SP leader calculates that even if the AIMIM gets 10,000 votes on each of the seats it contests, it will be from Muslims, who form our party’s votebank. “This can make or break several seats, and help the BJP,” says the leader.
Muslims — who make up 19 per cent of UP’s population, according to the 2011 Census data — are likely to be a decisive factor in around 60-70 seats, where their population ranges from 35 to 50 per cent.
Dismissing the Opposition’s charge of the AIMIM being the “BJP’s B-team”, the party’s State Executive Committee member Mohammad Salman says, “How can anyone say we are the B-team of the BJP? This tag goes away when we do well. Now, no one calls us the B-team in Bihar. Also, what about places like Karnataka where Congress governments are toppled by the BJP? Is the Congress going to blame us for that too?”