As Mamata Banerjee’s domain West Bengal is Asaduddin Owaisi's next election stop, the State can expect explosive electioneering
Asaduddin Owaisi is a politician with blue blood, which has turned crimson by barristry, a surname imported from Arabia and the leadership of a century-old party founded by Nawab Mahmood Nawaz Khan. In 1944, Razakar leader Qasim Rizvi was selected as the party’s leader, to also become the extra military force of the Nizam of Hyderabad.
In 1957, Rizvi was exiled to Pakistan but, before departing, he handed over the Majlis-e-Ittehadul-Muslimeen (MIM) to his right-hand man, Janab Abdul Wahid Owaisi. His son Sultan Salahuddin took over the party in 1975, and it was inherited by his illustrious son Asaduddin. The party headquarters are based in an impressive building, called Dar-us-Salam, near the famed Charminar.
Asaduddin inherited a single Lok Sabha seat, the Hyderabad city constituency. It is to his credit that the MIM is today an all-India name. It now threatens to bite off some Assembly seats in Bengal. Owais means “little wolf” in Arabic and, therefore, he is likely to hunt voraciously. By a stroke of coincidence, he was fielded against me in a television channel’s programme. Our debate was on a communal controversy. The anchor asked for his comments first, to which I reacted that Owaisi’s views might be coloured by those prevailing in a neighbouring country. His counter-reaction was explosive.
Thus, West Bengal can expect explosive electioneering. Mamata Didi too will not let Owaisi go quietly. She must know that for Muslim voters, there are no insiders or outsiders. Languages, other than Urdu, are unimportant. The sacred thread of Islam binds them all. Muslims are momins; the others, however neighbourly, are “different”. Hindu arguments do not cut ice with Muslims. The main fight between Didi and Janab will be in the eastern districts of West Bengal.
I imagine that the Hyderabadi appeal will be: “Come and vote for me, because I shall do everything for you. I have no loyalty other than towards the bandas of Allah the Merciful, whereas my opposition has other communities too to cater to. My party will be exclusively for you while the opposing kitchen will have to cook vegetarian as well as non-vegetarian; ‘niraamish’ as well as ‘saamish’.”
The result of their secular duality has been the Tareekh-e-Intekhab, or the history of elections in India: Flatter the Muslim, occasionally frighten him with a riot and then protect him, going back to flattery. In the eyes of Allah the Merciful, he may be a momin but in the view of the vote harvester, he is a tiger in a circus cage; the only grouse being that he is too sparingly fed to attack. Jawaharlal Nehru once said that he was a Hindu only by accident; he was a Muslim by culture and an Englishman by upbringing. He, therefore, knew how to make a Muslim tick. And tick he had to, for the Congress was dominated by the Patelites. Nehru had to build his own support base. Muslims, traumatised by Partition, were his first choice. Reputedly, they voted nearly 90 per cent whereas, in the early elections, the rest of the voters polled not more than 45 per cent. The net result was that one Muslim voter was worth two Hindus.
With the passage of time, things have changed; more Hindus go to the polling booth now. Late Syed Shahabuddin once wrote in a national daily that for his community, if there were a choice between development and identity, it would go for identity. In Nehru’s days, by electing him, the Muslim love for identity won. Although they were poor, India was a wonderful country. Lately, Hindu candidates are winning more because their community votes more. India has, therefore, become an “insecure” country.
For all these reasons, the Muslim clusters, wherever they be, are in search of new heroes; the parties of old ones appear to be folding up. One such superhero is Asaduddin, literally the lion of religion. Didi’s straight reply would be that Muslims alone cannot form a Government; they are too few. They have to combine with others and only then can they win a majority. Go back to the days and years of Babu Jagjivan Ram, who ended up as the Deputy Prime Minister. Never in his political career did he publicly discuss his caste. Had he done so, he might have got a maximum of 18 per cent votes. Wherefrom would he have gathered a minimum of another 33 per cent? The same will be the problem with Owaisi. Can he form a Government in West Bengal? Therefore, why waste your vote on such a party? As soon as the election is over, he would pack his achkan in a suitcase and take a flight to Hyderabad, bidding goodbye to the Bengalis and promising to see them in the next election. By all means, give him a bhand/kulhad of tea, but don’t waste your vote. I have neither an achkan nor suitcase, nor any flight to catch. Therefore, vote for me. It is undeniable that the ummah has given some votes in Bihar to Owaisi and elected five MLAs. It remains to be seen what these MIM MLAs do in Bengal.
After, say, one or two elections, in the event of an ascending path, whether Owaisi and his party could pose a threat to the integrity of the country, has to be seen. After all, we should not forget Partition. Soon after August 1947, HS Suhrawardy, former Premier of undivided Bengal, wrote to Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman in UP that the strategy for the Muslims staying behind in India should be to gather in clusters or mega ghettos. Incidentally, Khaliquzzaman became the president of the Muslim League in Pakistan after MA Jinnah passed away. This advice might imply that if several clusters gathered together, in due course, more partitions could be engineered. The Government of India should discourage cluster formations from now on.
There is one consolation that Owaisi hails from a land of dreamers, like Nizam Mir Osman Ali. He had Ali Yavar Jung, then Secretary (Constitutional Affairs), give the view that the Portuguese considered Marmagoa to be a dead-weight and would be willing to sell it at a reasonable price. The idea of buying Goa was too attractive to be dissipated by realism. When the World War ended, the prospects of success brightened. On Hyderabad’s side, the prime mover was Sir Mirza Ismail with Sir Walter Monckton as a close second.
The parleys in Lisbon had become known in India. Once India gained Independence, it was unlikely to acquiesce for long to Portugal’s rule over Goa, just as it rejected Hyderabad’s claim to independence. Still less would it permit Hyderabad’s transit rights over land or air space. If only Hyderabad had a port like Marmagoa, it would add enormously to its political and economic importance.
The meeting between the Portuguese and Hyderabad negotiators, on November 1, 1947, was attended by Portuguese Prime Minister Salazar, Sir Alexander Roger and Antonio Bastroff Silva. In bitter retrospect, the devoted Hyderabadi writer Zubeida Yazdani made two points. One was about Mir Osman Ali Khan’s “megalomaniac notions” which caused him “to lose the balance of his mind”. Her other grievance was that “the Nizam depended too strongly on the Muslim League for the achievement of his goal”, an independent Muslim State in the south of India.
(The writer is a well-known columnist and an author. The views expressed are personal.)
