The Seeker

{ONE}

THE RESULTS OF THE 2014 MAHARASHTRA ELECTION were announced on 19 October of that year. The vote, alongside another in Haryana, was part of the first round of state elections since Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party to a resounding victory in the national election five months earlier. With momentum behind it, the BJP won 122 of the 288 seats in the Maharashtra legislative assembly, more than doubling its previous total. The Indian National Congress, in keeping with its countrywide decline, won only 42 seats—half of what it previously held. The Shiv Sena, earlier the BJP’s partner in the state, registered a modest gain, securing 63 seats; and the Nationalist Congress Party, earlier partnered with the Congress, registered a modest loss, keeping 41. These parties’ fortunes received, expectedly, a great deal of public attention.

There was another party that got a lot of attention too—and largely out of the blue. The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, a virtual unknown in Maharashtra, won two seats—one in the heart of Mumbai, and the other in the district of Aurangabad—outperforming even the regional chauvinist Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, which won only one. AIMIM candidates were also runners-up in three other constituencies, and came third in eight. The party contested 24 seats in all, making its first big foray outside its stronghold in Hyderabad, in Telangana. At the time, the AIMIM had just retained seven legislative assembly seats from the city, and had a large presence in the Hyderabad municipal corporation. But that, excepting a smattering of seats in other local bodies, primarily in Telangana and Maharashtra, was as far as its power went.

The AIMIM—the acronym is sometimes truncated to MIM—received more scrutiny than perhaps any other party has in recent times for winning just two seats in a state election. The reason for this was clear. The AIMIM is, unabashedly and controversially, a Muslim party, and no Muslim party had shown any sign of pan-Indian appeal since the Muslim League in the days before Partition. The question on many minds—in some motivated by hope, in others by alarm—was whether the AIMIM could unite India’s 172-million-strong but politically scattered Muslim population, and whether the party’s leader, Asaduddin Owaisi, could become a national Muslim champion.

LATE ON THE SUNDAY MORNING of 1 November 2015, I stood outside Asaduddin’s room at a modest hotel in the district of Kishanganj, in the north-east corner of Bihar. The state was several weeks into a legislative assembly election, and its fifth and final phase of voting, which would include Kishanganj and the three neighbouring districts of Araria, Katihar and Purnea, was just days away. Together, the four districts, wedged between Bangladesh and Nepal, form the region of Seemanchal—one of the poorest areas in all of India. Muslims comprise roughly a sixth of the electorate in Bihar, and in Seemanchal that proportion goes up to roughly half. This was the AIMIM’s next testing ground, and it was vying for six seats in the region.

I had shown up uninvited. Through one of his media managers, Asaduddin had politely turned down my requests to interview him and follow him as he campaigned. I introduced myself to one of his staff, and tried to convince him to let me have a seat in a convoy preparing to ferry Asaduddin to a series of rallies.

At about 11 am—late by rural standards, but not by those of Asaduddin’s largely Hyderabadi entourage—he emerged from his room, surrounded by people. He was dressed as he always is in public: in a stern sherwani and a skullcap, with a neat beard and rectangular glasses. He overheard me, and turned to give me a brief, inscrutable glance on his march down the stairs and into one of the waiting vehicles. In a moment, the car raced away towards the noise and chaos of Kishanganj town, the district headquarters.

Asaduddin’s staff raced to catch up. All the vehicles were full, but after some wrangling and a few phone calls to Hyderabadi acquaintances, I managed to secure a cramped spot. We crossed Kishanganj town to emerge onto a newly, and barely, paved highway headed south, towards West Bengal. The way was lined intermittently with frail huts and half-built concrete houses—testament both to Seemanchal’s enduring poverty and gradual, recent progress.

A swarm of young men in party-issued green caps accompanied the convoy on motorbikes, shouting slogans and waving the party flag: seven stars and a crescent moon in white on a green background, with the party’s name in Urdu and its initials in Roman script. One motorbike sported a large board on its side. On one face, it promised voters “Financial development. Health service. Education.” On the other, it had almost life-size portraits of Asaduddin and his brother, Akbaruddin—the party’s number two. Pictured beside Asaduddin, Akbaruddin stood glaringly clean shaven, with his head uncovered. At a rally in Kishanganj in early October, he had called Modi a devil and a tyrant. An arrest warrant was issued for him on charges of hate speech, and he had stayed away from Bihar since. The portraits were a reminder of how, in appearance and demeanor, Akbaruddin serves as a foil to his apparently more pious and measured brother; and of how, even in his absence, Akbaruddin’s firebrand ways provide a constant undertone to the politics of the AIMIM.

After driving for about half an hour, we pulled in at a two-storey government middle school. About a thousand people huddled in what shade they could find in the grounds—under trees or a tarpaulin, or on the school veranda. The veranda wall was painted with quotes and poetry, and I noticed an Urdu couplet from the poet and philosopher Iqbal:

Sabaq fir padh sadaqat ka, shujaat ka, adaalat ka,

Liya jayega tujhse kaam duniya ki imamat ka

(Read again the lessons of truth, of valour, of justice,

As you will be given the responsibility of leading the world)

Asaduddin sat on a dais, next to several local leaders. Each took a turn to address the crowd and introduce their guest. Over loudspeakers, they blared out superlatives—“the lion-hearted leader,” “the frank and fearless,” “the messiah of the oppressed,” “the upholder of the constitution.” Young men crowded in close and cheered, excited to see Asaduddin in the flesh after having heard him online. One of them showed me a video on his phone, of pictures and footage of the Owaisi brothers set to a Bollywood soundtrack. Older listeners stood farther from the stage, squinting ahead and seeming circumspect.

Finally, the announcer invited Asaduddin to speak. “It is our tradition that we respect our guests,” he reminded the audience. “We helped elect Syed Shahabuddin”—a former diplomat and a vocal defender of Muslim rights, who won several Lok Sabha terms from this area between the late 1970s and early 1990s. “We helped elect MJ Akbar”—a journalist turned politician, now in the Rajya Sabha, who won here with the Congress in 1989, quit the party, and joined the BJP in 2014. “And, by mistake, we once even elected Shahnawaz Hussain”—a BJP politician now serving as the party’s spokesperson, whom local voters supported in 1999, and rejected in 2004. The crowd laughed. As the announcer reminded them, all of these three had relied on Seemanchal’s Muslims to launch or revive their political careers, but had done little afterwards to repay them.

Asaduddin rose up and approached the front of the stage. He stood over six feet tall, and had to adjust the microphone to his height. He began gently, offering salaams and thanks, then changed his tone and tempo. “You have voted for these parties”—the Congress, and Bihar’s major state parties, the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Janata Dal (United)—“for 50 years,” he said. “What did Seemanchal get?” The crowd remained silent. “This is being done in a planned manner,” Asaduddin roared. “There is no one in the Bihar assembly who can raise our concerns.”

He talked about the oft-repeated claim by the BJP, and by its parent outfit, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, that this region was being overrun by illegal Bangladeshi migrants—a claim used to cast doubt on the national allegiance of all local Muslims and stoke communal polarisation. “We have lived here for 1,200 years,” Asaduddin said. “We don’t need a certificate of loyalty. … We are born here, and when we die our graves will be witness to our loyalty.”

A few days earlier, Amit Shah, the BJP’s president and the head of its campaign in Bihar, had told a crowd that if his party lost in the state, there would be celebrations in Pakistan. “Arre, Amit Shah, what has happened to your brain?” Asaduddin said. “What do we have to do with Pakistan? Elections are happening in Bihar, not some state in Pakistan.” The crowd loved the jibe.

Next, Asaduddin brought up Narendra Modi’s recent assertion that the incumbent Bihar government wanted to take away educational and employment opportunities reserved for other disadvantaged groups and transfer them to “a particular community”—Muslims. “India’s PM threatens that reservations would be removed,” Asaduddin said. “Aey, Modi, it is our constitutional right. The constitution guarantees it to Dalits and other backward groups.”

Asaduddin went on for about 40 minutes, and then rushed, after a quick stop at a local mosque for prayer, to his next rally. Campaigning was to end soon, and the pressure was on to address as many voters as possible. Through the afternoon and into the evening, he moved from place to place, repeating, more or less, his speech from the school. In two places, Dalit leaders shared the stage and addressed the crowd, and spoke of Dalit-Muslim unity. The AIMIM had nominated a Dalit in one of the constituencies it was contesting.

By the end of the evening, Asaduddin was addressing his fifth and last rally of the day, in the glare of flourescent lights set up to dispel the surrounding darkness. Reactions to Asaduddin’s speeches through the day had been reserved, except among some enthusiastic youngsters. My conversations with those who came out to hear him confirmed what many already knew: that the Grand Alliance, which brought together the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Janata Dal (United), had mustered enormous popular support, including among Muslims in Seemanchal. One common question I heard was what the AIMIM, even if it won all six of the seats it was contesting, could really do in the state assembly with just a handful of representatives. Many were saying that the party stood some chance in just a single constituency—Kochadhaman, where it had fielded its state president, Akhtarul Iman.

It seemed Asaduddin had also resigned himself to this. He made a pitch for that one possible seat. “People say, what will one do?” he asked. “It was One who created the world. It was One whose followers we all are. Everything will fall in place beginning from one, Inshallah.” He ended with an appeal for mutabadil—change.

The mutabadil never came. The Grand Alliance secured a massive majority, to the embarrassment of the BJP. The AIMIM did not win a single seat. Even in Kochadhaman, where it had its best showing, Akhtarul Iman fell short of the winning candidate’s nearly 56,000 votes by almost 20,000.

{TWO}

AFTER PARTITION, THOSE MUSLIMS who chose to stay in India were left leaderless. The Muslim League, under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, never had universal Muslim support, but was still the only Muslim party with a national base in British India. At Independence, the Muslim League moved to Pakistan, taking its most prominent figures with it. With no real alternative available, Indian Muslims turned to the Congress.

The Congress did boast some credible Muslim leaders, most notably the independence hero Abul Kalam Azad. Azad was vocal on Muslim issues, but had strong differences with more powerful leaders in the party, such as Vallabhbhai Patel, and was gradually sidelined.

Azad died in 1958, and was followed in 1964 by Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru’s departure marked a generational change in the Congress’s leadership, but even after his daughter, Indira Gandhi, took over, no strong Muslim leaders emerged, although Muslims largely continued to vote for the party.

The backlash against Gandhi after she imposed the Emergency in 1975 opened the door to Muslim organisation outside Congress control. As the popular vote shifted strongly away from the Congress, the Muslim vote did too, and many Muslim politicians joined the opposition, under the Janata Party. One of them was Syed Shahabuddin.

Shahabuddin inspired tremendous enthusiasm among Muslims well beyond his constituency. His star rose particularly high after the controversial Shah Bano case, when he spoke out against a 1985 Supreme Court judgment that required a Muslim man to pay alimony to his divorced wife, which many took as an affront to Muslim personal law. He took a strong stand on another major issue of Muslim politics in the 1980s too—the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, spearheaded by the RSS and the BJP, to demolish the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on the belief that it stood on the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. In 1986, Shahabuddin opposed a district-court decision that, with the backing of the ruling Congress, allowed Hindus to worship in the mosque. By now, he was being viewed as a man capable of uniting the national Muslim electorate.

To resist the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, Shahabuddin formed and led the Babri Masjid Movement Coordination Committee, which brought together Muslim leaders from across the country. But, following disagreements over how to respond to the decision to allow Hindu worship in the mosque, the committee split, and a rival group called the Babri Masjid Action Committee was formed. With various Muslim groups backing one side or another, Muslim opinion split too. In 1992, Hindutva activists demolished the mosque. Shahabuddin continued in politics for some years, but never recovered his earlier stature.

Meanwhile, the rise of regional parties and continued disaffection with the Congress shifted the allegiances of many Muslim voters. In some places, such as Hyderabad and Kerala, they found specifically Muslim parties to represent them. Elsewhere, as in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, they looked to formations such as the Janata parties, which emerged from the resistance to the Emergency. The Congress continued to field some Muslim faces, but these tended to be chosen by the party’s high command and lacked broad appeal.

Through the early part of the 2000s, Muslim parties continued to emerge—the All India United Democratic Front in Assam, and smaller outfits such as the Peace Party of India in Uttar Pradesh. But still, no party or person managed to consolidate the Muslim vote beyond isolated pockets. Kashmiri parties, locked in their own complex politics, have never operated on the Indian mainland. The Indian Union Muslim League, founded in 1948, retains a bastion in north Kerala, and the AIUDF has established a firm foothold in Assam. Only the AIMIM has made a concerted effort to reach out beyond its home base.

The prize the party is aiming for is tempting. Muslims account for 14.2 percent of the Indian population as per the last census, from 2011. For context, consider that the BJP won the 2014 general election with 31.3 percent of the popular vote, and the Congress won in 2009 with 28.6 percent. Muslims also comprise large parts of the population in several highly populous, and so politically crucial, states—16.9 percent in Bihar, 19.3 percent in Uttar Pradesh, 34.2 percent in Assam, 27 percent in West Bengal and 11.5 percent in Maharashtra. Any party that could win even roughly corresponding vote shares in each place would have a great say in these states’ and the country’s politics, particularly when it comes to forming, or undermining, coalition governments.

Asaduddin’s Bihar campaign might have come to nothing, but it played on a host of themes that speak to Indian Muslims today no matter where they live. He tapped into Muslim frustration at being left behind by India’s economic growth in the last decades—something confirmed by the Sachar Committee, constituted by a Congress-led government in 2005, which found large inequalities in education, employment and earnings between Indian Muslims and other demographic groups. He played up resentment against parties and politicians that had won Muslim backing in the past but failed to deliver on promises of uplift for the community. He spoke of Muslims asserting their constitutional rights—a departure from the language of victimisation that defined much of Muslim politics during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and through the end of the last century. He cultivated a partnership with Dalits, who also feel hard done by India’s present political establishment. He displayed his willingness to take on the BJP and other Hindutva organisations, countering their persistent questioning of Muslim loyalties with assertions of the community’s patriotism. And he did it all in chaste Urdu sprinkled with religious references, dressed and groomed to display his piety, with no attempt to play down his identity as a Muslim.

All of these themes form a foundation for an aspiring Muslim mass leader to work from. Asaduddin also has the advantage of fluent English, from his days studying law in the United Kingdom. This adds to his appeal among young Muslims, who often see him as a symbol of their own aspirations, and allows him visibility in the influential English-language national media, particularly its prime-time talk shows. He has added to this by consistently thrusting himself into the limelight in matters of importance to Muslims, and also to the Indian mainstream’s view of them. For instance, when a Muslim man was lynched near the Uttar Pradesh town of Dadri last September on the suspicion of eating beef, Asaduddin was among the first politicians to visit the victim’s family and denounce Modi’s silence on the incident. In 2013, he accepted an invitation to Pakistan—a tricky proposition for any Indian Muslim leader, and particularly so for one from Hyderabad—to appear on a television panel alongside representatives from the Congress and the BJP. When challenged on the position of Muslims in India, Asaduddin told his Pakistani interrogators, “You stop worrying about Indian Muslims, they decided 60 years ago that India is their nation.” He also defended India’s constitutional order, reminding the audience that “our preamble is secular” and that “we all abide by our constitution.” Back in India, footage of the event went viral.

His projection is also helped by the fact that other parties have sometimes used him as a convenient punching bag in promoting their own politics. During campaigning in Bihar, for instance, Amit Shah, in search of a Muslim villain, proclaimed that his real opposition was not Lalu Prasad Yadav of the Grand Alliance, but Asaduddin. And the Congress leader Digvijaya Singh alleged that Asaduddin was colluding with the BJP to siphon away Muslim votes from other parties.

But Asaduddin’s style of politics also places him in a fraught position. To remain viable and visible as a political leader on the national stage while retaining credibility among Muslims, he must walk a fine line between the Indian establishment and Muslim voters. His constant defence of Muslim patriotism, for example, is a concession to the now deeply ingrained suspicion of Muslims in the Indian public mind. And it is hard to imagine the national media allowing Asaduddin the airtime he currently receives if his views on Kashmir were not, unlike those of many Muslim leaders in the past, broadly in line with the Indian nationalist insistence that the valley is an integral part of the country. Amid the raging protests in Kashmir in 2010, Asaduddin said in parliament, “Kashmir is part of our India. We love Kashmir, but why don’t we love the Kashmiris?” He also travelled to Srinagar with a parliamentary delegation and met the separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. “I disagree with Geelani-ji on many issues,” he later told reporters. “We don’t believe in his idea of azadi for Kashmir.” This July, with Kashmir gripped by another cycle of repression and defiance, he spoke in parliament against the excessive violence of Indian security forces, and added, “We all have to think about how can we remove the slogans of ‘Azadi’ from the minds of Kashmiri youth, how we can unfurl the Indian tricolour there instead of the Pakistani flag.”

Such views have not won Asaduddin many friends among Kashmiri Muslims, but they are not his target voters. Past his occasional pronouncements, he has kept the issue of Kashmir at a distance—much as Muslims on the Indian mainland now do, by and large separating their politics from those of Kashmiris.

How far a Muslim leader in the mould of Asaduddin can go—or, for that matter, a Muslim party in the mould of the AIMIM—is unclear. Any victory for the party in Bihar would have been largely symbolic, but, as with its limited but eye-catching success in Maharashtra, its value would still have been immense. The lack of anything to show for its campaign in that election cooled the buzz of the party possibly gaining national status. Earlier this year, the AIMIM faltered again, when it contested and lost two seats in the Tamil Nadu election. Since 1984, the party has held just a solitary Lok Sabha seat, from Hyderabad—occupied by Asaduddin’s father until 2004, and now by Asaduddin himself—despite efforts to contest more constituencies in recent general elections.

There also remains the question of just what kind of politics the AIMIM would practise on the national level if it ever did gain greater sway. Its approach to power in Maharashtra is a test of if and how it can translate what it professes into action, but its tenure there is still too short to offer real insight. The best place to look for answers is the city that, over the last half-century, the AIMIM has made its fortress: Hyderabad.

{THREE}

THE MAJLIS-E-ITTEHADUL MUSLIMEEN was founded in 1926, in the princely state of Hyderabad, as a Muslim organisation to support the Nizams, who ruled the territory as vassals of the British. In the approach to Independence, as religious polarisation increased across India, the MIM gravitated ever more towards Muslim supremacism, and towards asserting itself in politics. A crucial figure in this was Qasim Razvi, who first headed the MIM’s militia, called the Razakars, and then the MIM itself.

When the British left in 1947, the Nizam, with the MIM’s support, chose to defy the new Indian government’s attempts to incorporate Hyderabad into its territory. The Razakars went on a rampage against those they saw as enemies—primarily Hyderabad’s Hindu majority, but also communists and Muslims in favour of the merger—raping and killing many thousands of people, and setting off reprisal attacks.

The Indian government sent in its military, under what was euphemistically called a “police action.” Now there were widespread reports of atrocities against Muslims by Indian forces, and by Hindu groups too, but these were largely suppressed. Abul Kalam Azad tried to visit Hyderabad, but was stopped by Vallabhbhai Patel, then the minister of home affairs. The Razakars were swiftly crushed, and Razvi was imprisoned. A government report later estimated that between 27,000 and 40,000 people lost their lives in the violence. The MIM’s headquarters, Darussalam, was seized, and later turned into a fire station.

MIM leaders were either packed away to Pakistan or barred from public life, and for about a decade the organisation remained inactive. In 1957, Razvi was released from jail and given just two days to migrate to Pakistan. Before he left, he called a meeting of the governing council of the MIM. With many of its leaders already in Pakistan and others scared to reassociate themselves with the controversial group, only about a third of the old council turned up. Razvi offered to hand the leadership of the group over to anyone willing to accept it, but, the story goes, no one came forward. Finally, a young barrister by the name of Abdul Wahid Owaisi agreed to take it on. That man was Asaduddin’s grandfather.

Abdul Wahid went about transforming the MIM into a party geared to the demands of electoral politics. He renamed it the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, and changed its constitution, to now swear allegiance not to the Nizams but to the Indian republic.

But with the trauma of the preceding decade still fresh, there was strong resistance to the revival of the group. Muslim leaders from the Congress, and from other organisations across the country, issued statements against the AIMIM. The Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind warned against associating with the party, “lest there be dangerous consequences to which the activities of such organisations led in the past”—an obvious reference to the “police action.”

Abdul Wahid took to the streets, speaking to crowds at chowks and bazaars. Within months, in 1958, he and three of his AIMIM fellows were arrested, and he was charged with hate speech. He remained in jail for almost 11 months. After his release, the AIMIM put forward candidates in almost half of the 64 constituencies for Hyderabad’s 1960 municipal corporation election. It won 19 of them—including a constituency reserved for Dalits, where the party fielded a candidate to blunt charges that it was communal.

The AIMIM seemed to have arrived. The Congress, the leading party of the time, won only 33 seats in that vote. But to counter its new rival, it suddenly and controversially merged the municipalities of Hyderabad and neighbouring Secunderabad, where the AIMIM had not fought the vote.

Elections followed in 1962, both for the Lok Sabha and the state assembly. Abdul Wahid decided that the party would contest nine assembly seats, all from Hyderabad, and that he would fight for a Lok Sabha seat from the city himself. The results were disheartening. Abdul Wahid lost, and only one AIMIM candidate made it into the assembly—Salahuddin Owaisi, Abdul Wahid’s son (officially, he ran as an independent candidate).

Meanwhile, there was speculation that the AIMIM was being covertly encouraged by the Congress, which had ruled the state since its creation. At the time, both parties had a common adversary in the city—communists. A 1962 article in the communist weekly New Age said, “a section of the Congress leadership in (Hyderabad) City felt that the Muslims were rallying behind the Communist Party for a positive economic programme and this could be prevented if a Muslim organization like the Ittihad-ul-Muslimeen came onto the scene.”

Abdul Wahid continued to groom Salahuddin as his successor. In 1967, the young scion was again elected to the state assembly, this time from the Charminar constituency in the centre of old Hyderabad—which the party has since come to consider its electoral heart.

The AIMIM’s usefulness to the Congress came to the fore in 1969, when Andhra Pradesh was gripped by a movement demanding that part of its territory be ceded to create a new state, Telangana. The state government struggled to contain the unrest, and 369 people were killed by police fire. The AIMIM backed the Congress and opposed the Telangana movement. It got Darussalam back as a reward.

Through the 1970s, Andhra Pradesh’s Congress rulers, lacking confidence in their stature in Hyderabad, suspended municipal polls. Still, the AIMIM kept gaining strength there.

Abdul Wahid died in 1975. Salahuddin took over the party, and quickly imposed his own style of politics. He was more assertive than his father, and employed a more provocative rhetoric, often accusing the Indian state of abandoning Muslims.

These were volatile times in Hyderabad. Communal tensions had remained high ever since Independence, but now they became particularly aggravated. In 1978, a Muslim woman was allegedly raped, and her husband was killed, in police custody. Salahuddin demanded an official inquiry, but the state’s chief minister refused. Muslims came out in protest, and a police station was burnt down. The entire episode earned Salahuddin and the AIMIM greater visibility than ever before.

Through the following decade, Hyderabad witnessed what seemed to be at least one major communal clash every year. Often the spark came from religious celebrations, such as Hindu processions for Ganesh Chaturthi, which were also displays of communal strength. As a tit for tat, the AIMIM encouraged showy celebrations of Muslim holy days, and so fuelled a cycle of provocation and retaliation.

Salahuddin’s reputation as a rabble-rouser burgeoned. He was arrested multiple times on charges of provoking violence, but was discharged every time. It helped that the AIMIM had some powerful friends. In a show of the strength of its partnership with the Congress, in 1978 Indira Gandhi visited Darussalam—and, the party folklore has it, presented Salahuddin with a Quran.

In 1983, the newly founded Telugu Desam Party defeated the Congress in the assembly elections—a first in the history of Andhra Pradesh—and the AIMIM supported the TDP’s leader, NT Rama Rao, in his bid to become the state’s chief minister. As a reward, the Andhra Pradesh government helped the AIMIM establish a party-affiliated medical college in Hyderabad. This furthered another plank of Salahuddin’s politics: he gave the city numerous beneficial institutions, including a cooperative bank and a polytechnic institute, and spurred a rise in philanthropy.

Meanwhile, the communal clashes kept coming. With the Ram Janmabhoomi movement growing, 1984 was especially bloody, with some 200 people killed in the city. The Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee, in a report released in December that year, was clear as to whom it held responsible. “The worst culprits in this regard are the MIM and the BJP,” it wrote, “but they are by no means the only culprit. Congress (I)”—Indira Gandhi’s faction of the Congress—“and both the factions of TDP have utlilised the opportunity for their own ends. The leaders of these parties (particularly MIM and BJP) make unbelievably provocative speeches, full of lies and slander against the other community, which have often directly resulted in communal violence.”

That same year also saw a Lok Sabha election. Salahuddin, who had remained in the state assembly throughout, contested the Hyderabad constituency, and was elected to the Lok Sabha. The AIMIM has not relinquished that seat since.

In 1986, municipal polls returned, under court orders to the state’s TDP government. The AIMIM won the largest number of seats of any party, and, over the next five years, appointed the city’s mayors. It has remained a major power in the municipality ever since.

For a few years, the city had a respite from communal bloodshed. But in 1990, with the country in a ferment over the Babri Masjid controversy, clashes erupted again. Several hundred people were killed over multiple weeks, and the city was regularly placed under curfew.

After the mosque was demolished in 1992, tensions within the AIMIM over its position on the Babri Masjid movement spilled out into public view. In December that year, Mohammed Amanullah Khan, the party’s leader in the Andhra Pradesh assembly, accused Salahuddin of remaining silent on the demolition—implying that he had colluded with the Congress in allowing the Ram Janmabhoomi movement to proceed. The AIMIM had, in fact, been noticeably reluctant to join protests against the mosque’s destruction, even though Salahuddin was then the chairman of the Babri Masjid Action Committee, the group that had broken with Syed Shahabuddin. Salahuddin had returned to Hyderabad from Delhi within days of the demolition, and led a rally from the airport in celebration of having secured official recognition for the party’s medical college. Amanullah termed the recognition a reward for Salahuddin’s silence.

Amanullah might have had ulterior motives. He and Salahuddin both had sons arriving at full adulthood, and a showdown between their two families over future control of the party seemed inevitable. Still, the perception that Salahuddin had betrayed the Muslim community gained traction.

Salahuddin’s response was audacious. He went to the Mecca Masjid—old Hyderabad’s iconic seventeenth-century mosque—put a Quran on his head, and swore in the name of Allah that he had not collaborated with anyone to ignore the Babri Masjid’s demolition. “If I have done anything like this, then may I and my progeny be ruined,” he declared. “Otherwise, may Amanullah Khan and his progeny be ruined.”

The dispute split the AIMIM, and Amanullah formed a new party, the Majlis Bachao Tehreek. After some initial success, the MBT lost its sheen, and last year it lost its last seat on the Hyderabad municipal council. In the city’s drawing rooms, people still talk about Salahuddin’s curse.

ASADUDDIN AGREED TO AN INTERVIEW on the morning of 19 March, at Darussalam—the “abode of peace.” This is a two-storey building all in white, in the middle of a complex that houses several of the AIMIM’s offshoots—colleges, a medical centre, a newspaper. A covered, colonnaded verandah opens out onto a large ground in front of the building, where party leaders often gather and address their followers. Some young men in colourful uniforms were using it for a cricket match that day, and their friends sat by the verandah, hooting.

The state assembly was in extended session that Sunday, so the party’s seven MLAs were not expected at Darussalam. But its 44 corporators were, and they kept arriving, one by one, and taking their seats at their desks—the men in a hall on one side of the verandah, the women in another just opposite. A board on one wall listed the names and phone numbers of all AIMIM corporators, and the dates that each would be available for public meetings. Fridays are holidays, and everyone is expected to be present on Sundays.

Asaduddin was a few minutes late. He called me to apologise, and said that he was on his way. I joined a crowd of petitioners waiting on the verandah. He arrived soon afterwards, accompanied by his four-year-old son—he and his wife, Farheen, were married in 1996, and also have five daughters. Everyone stood up and shuffled out of his way. As is customary in Hyderabad, the men bowed quarter-way, and raised their right palms close to their faces. Asaduddin responded in kind.

He sat down at a bench behind a long desk near the back wall, and a line formed before him. A student’s scholarship funds from the government had not reached his school. Asaduddin asked his staff to call the school and find out what was going on. A woman in burqa complained, very quietly, that the police were refusing to file an FIR, and Asaduddin leaned in to hear her better. He called the station in question to make an appointment on her behalf.

After he had heard the crowd out, Asaduddin asked me, and another reporter whom he had invited that morning, to follow him through a door at the back of the verandah, into Darussalam’s main hall. Inside, white walls rose up to a high ceiling, their tops detailed with golden paint. A full-sized portrait of Salahuddin greeted us as we entered, and unlit chandeliers dangled overhead. A clay tiger sat in one corner in a frozen roar.

Asaduddin relaxed on a sofa. “These are all Akbar’s choices,” he said, smiling, as I surveyed the hall. “Chandelier from some place, curtains from some other place.” He asked his son, fiddling beside him, to greet me. The boy bowed, and softly pronounced, “Salamalekum.”

Asaduddin, the oldest of Salahuddin’s four children, was born in May of 1969. He was followed a year later by Akbaruddin, and later by another brother, Burhanuddin, and a sister, Amir Sultana. As children, Asaduddin recalled, he and Akbaruddin would accompany their father to rallies near Hyderabad during summer vacations. “But it didn’t last for more than two to three days,” he said. “He knew as kids our excitement would not last for long, and we would get bored.”

By his telling, he first tried his hand at public life early on. “I gave my first speech at the age of ten,” he said, “in Owaisipura”—a Hyderabad neighbourhood named after the Owaisi family. “There was no one to speak, so I rose up and spoke. But when my father got to know about it, he got furious. He told me to instead concentrate on my studies.”

Asaduddin went on to join the prestigious Nizam’s College, in Hyderabad, where he indulged his love for cricket. He was a good bowler, and once, he told me, at an inter-university tournament, even squared up against Venkatesh Prasad, who went on to bowl for India at the international level. He often bunked lectures to play. “It was a BA without going to classes,” he said. (Asaduddin’s love of the game endures, and he often tweets in support of the Indian cricket team. An annual cricket tournament is held in Hyderabad in his name.)

One of Asaduddin’s teammates at college was CV Anand, now the police commissioner of the Cyberabad area in the south of the city. Anand, who was a bowler himself, told me in mid March that Asaduddin was “reasonably good at it,” though he had a funny bowling action. Just a few days before we met, Anand said, he had hit a century in a police championship, and Asaduddin had called him to joke that his juniors must have bowled him lollypops—“Bhaaya, how did you hit a century at this age? Did you put a gun to your juniors’ heads?”

Salahuddin wanted his son to study law. “For some reason,” Asaduddin said, “he would always say he wanted me to go to Lincoln’s Inn”—one of the leading law colleges of the United Kingdom, whose alumni include Margaret Thatcher and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Asaduddin was packed off to London in 1989—the same year Akbaruddin was sent to Gulbarga, in Karnataka, to study medicine.

London was a world removed from Hyderabad. Asaduddin relished his city’s famous food, but London had nothing like it. He didn’t know how to cook for himself, “not even omelettes.” His saviour was a fellow law student named Abhishek, from West Bengal.

Asaduddin struggled to find friends in London. While there, he added with regret, he also became a chain-smoker. (He has since quit.) Like many other Indian students, he said, he worked part-time at stores and restaurants to help pay his bills. He once joined a McDonald’s on Oxford Street. “On the very first day,” he said, “they asked me to mop the toilet floor.”

Another of his enduring memories of London was visiting Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, where the atmosphere of rebellion surprised him. “They spoke openly against the queen,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine doing that in India.”

In 1994, Asaduddin sat for his exams. With that done, he decided to travel to Chicago. “I thought I would flunk the bar, so I thought, let’s go on a trip to the US,” he said. He called Abhishek in London to check on the results when they came out. Abhishek’s wife answered, and Asaduddin asked if her husband had passed. He hadn’t, Asaduddin recalled her saying, “but you have.”

Asaduddin called his father, who was ecstatic. Salahuddin wanted to fight the jibe, popular among Hyderabad’s intelligentsia, that the AIMIM was “a party of rickshaw-pullers.” Asaduddin’s foreign degree could be a big selling point. Though it was 1.30 am in the city, the family began distributing sweets in celebration.

On his return home, Asaduddin was sent straight into battle. He fought for the Charminar seat in the 1994 state assembly election, and won it handsomely. But that was the only seat the AIMIM won that year, losing three seats that it previously held. Amanullah’s new MBT won two.

The MBT had become a headache for the AIMIM. To hit back at it, the party turned to another young Owaisi. Akbaruddin, who already had a bad-boy reputation, never completed his degree at Gulbarga, and had become estranged from the family after marrying a Christian woman. But now the Owaisis were reconciled, and, in 1999, Akbaruddin stood against Amanullah in Chandrayangutta, a constituency that the MBT leader had won in the last four assembly elections. Akbaruddin defeated him, and has not lost the seat since. Asaduddin defended Charminar, and two other AIMIM candidates were elected too. The MBT faded away.

Asaduddin played a big part in the AIMIM’s gains. With his mix of Western education and display of religious values, he proved very popular among young Muslim voters, who swelled the party’s cadre. He also tried to emulate his father, who had a reputation for rushing on a motorbike to the site of any communal confrontation in his younger days, without fear of repercussions. In 1998, Asaduddin spent six weeks in prison on charges of rioting and looting—which a court eventually dismissed, he told me, because police documents claimed he was present at five different places at the exact same time.

One day in 1999, Asaduddin recalled, he heard that “sanghis were pelting stones and had eve-teased a few women” in the old city. He went straight there. Tensions were high. The Andhra Pradesh chief minister, N Chandrababu Naidu of the TDP, had allied with the BJP, and was bidding to be re-elected in an upcoming assembly election. The AIMIM, partnered with the Congress, was campaigning against him. As Asaduddin was leaving a meeting with the allegedly molested women, a group of men from a Special Task Force of the state jumped him. “They beat me to the ground,” Asaduddin told me. “I would stand and drag myself away to escape. It kept on going for about 40 yards.” He heard one man say, “Aise nahi marta. Goli maro ise.” (He won’t die this way. Shoot him.)

To his luck, a sub-inspector and a hawaldar from the local police—“a Hindu SI and a Muslim hawaldar,” Asaduddin emphasised—came to his rescue. They dragged him into their car, “but the STF guys kept pounding.” Eventually, he got away. The attack left him with 13 stitches and persistent back pain. “I remember it well,” he said. “It was 22 September.”

A report on the incident in The Telegraph read:

Asaduddin was admitted to a hospital. His father arrived soon afterwards, and then his wife, with their young twin daughters. Salahuddin told her that she could go home, that her husband was fine and would be discharged in two hours. Asaduddin didn’t know how to react. “We exchanged glances,” he said, “and I assured her I am all okay.” She left, and Salahuddin did too. “I could hardly turn, stand or sit,” Asaduddin told me.

AIMIM supporters were calling for a bandh the next day in protest, but Salahuddin did not allow it. Asaduddin remained in hospital for the night, and the next morning got a call from his father. “What are you doing there?” he remembered being told. “Get out. The party workers are demoralised.”

When Asaduddin left the hospital, he asked his father why he hadn’t called for a bandh. What if we call a bandh, Salahuddin asked, and someone else gets killed?

Asaduddin said his father had already told him, “You have to leave your angrezpana”—your English ways. “There is nothing called ‘my time.’ ‘I’ ends here.” Now, he received another lesson in fortitude and responsibility. “I knew what Baba meant when he warned me before I joined politics, but I didn’t know it would be this difficult.”

In 2004, after four decades in elected office, Salahuddin decided to step down. Asaduddin contested the Hyderabad Lok Sabha seat in his place. He had spent a decade in the Andhra Pradesh assembly by then, and had experience to show, but he still lacked the stature of his father, and needed to shore up support. Asaduddin managed to rally a large group of Hyderabadi clerics from several denominations, getting them to issue statements and take out newspaper advertisements in his support.

Asaduddin’s overt religiosity certainly helped. He had cultivated it carefully, both in his appearance and his habits. The first thing he did when he came home from London, for instance, was to go to the Mecca Masjid to offer namaz. But it had taken some time for him to arrive at the kind of pluralist view of Islam that could bring together a variety of clerics behind him. The Owaisi family, like most Hyderabadi Muslims, has long followed local Sufi traditions. Two close associates of Asaduddin from the time he returned from London told me they believed he had veered towards a more literalist interpretation of the Quran while he was abroad. Over time, he returned to his family’s old beliefs and practices.

Today, the AIMIM takes in a diversity of Muslim backgrounds and orientations. Its MLAs include Sunnis and Shias, and also a Barkas representative, from a community brought to Hyderabad from Yemen by the Nizams. In his addresses, Asaduddin avoids talking about Sunnis versus Shias, or of any other divisions within the Muslim community. In recent years, he has followed Nu Ha Mim Keller, an American Sufi preacher living in Jordan, whom Asaduddin hosts in Hyderabad every year.

With the clerics’ backing, Asaduddin was elected to parliament. In the concurrent state election, the AIMIM retained its four seats in the Andhra Pradesh assembly.

SALAHUDDIN DIED IN 2008, at the age of 77. Another round of national and state elections followed the next year, and Asaduddin faced another test. With his father gone, there were questions over how many of the AIMIM’s old voters would still stand by the party. And Asaduddin went up against a more credible opponent than he had five years earlier: Zahid Ali Khan, who enjoyed the support of much of the city’s intelligentsia.

Zahid, the editor of the local Urdu paper Siasat, was once an AIMIM loyalist, as was his father before him. But in 2005, he and Asaduddin fell out, for reasons that have never been fully clear, and he joined the TDP. Zahid told me earlier this year that he left after a disagreement over suspect donations to the AIMIM’s medical college. But controversy over such donations was nothing new—Siasat itself ran a campaign in 1999 against donations being made in exchange for admission to the college.

After the split, Siasat published several allegations of corruption in the AIMIM, and went after Asaduddin personally. On one occasion, it claimed he had never passed the bar in the United Kingdom. Asaduddin produced his academic papers, and took Siasat to court.

In March 2007, as Zahid was being driven home one evening, a young man on a motorbike knocked on his car window. As he lowered it, an autorickshaw pulled up, and someone inside it drenched him in sewage. In 2009, a group of men attacked him and two Siasat reporters as they were leaving a wedding.

Zahid pointed fingers at the AIMIM, and Asaduddin condemned these actions. But the attacks on Zahid continued; he was pelted with stones during the 2009 campaign. Asaduddin himself was caught on camera around this time thrashing a TDP worker with a stick, and booked for rioting. He said that the man was involved in rigging the vote.

There was also another headache for the AIMIM. Between 2004 and 2009, leftist parties tried to re-establish themselves in Hyderabad, decades after they had been frozen out. The AIMIM did not tolerate their presence. “They beat our workers,” M Srinivas, a local leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), told me in March. “They beat even our Rajya Sabha MP, P Madhu.”

Asaduddin retained his Lok Sabha seat, with a greater share of the vote than in 2004. The AIMIM won seven constituencies for the state assembly. But though the challenge of Zahid had been firmly rebuffed, the party was struggling with its response to unprecedented events that would raise questions over its credibility and conduct in the coming years.

On the third Friday of May in 2007, a bomb had ripped through the Mecca Masjid near the end of the noon prayer, killing 11 people and injuring scores more. Demonstrations gathered, and police were deployed across the city. By evening, they had shot five demonstrators dead.

Television channels were soon reporting that the blast was the work of Shahid Bilal, an operative of a fundamentalist outfit working from Bangladesh. Police claimed that the attack was the result of hostility between rival Islamic schools of thoughts, and the Andhra Pradesh home minister said it could be the handiwork of foreign elements. In the coming days, security forces raided several locations, particularly in the old city, and detained over 70 young Muslim men. Over the next few weeks, 20 of them were formally arrested, and the rest were released. Many Hyderabadis refused to believe Muslims could have bombed the mosque, and there were fears that confusion and rumours could spark communal fighting. Asaduddin had often questioned the arrests of Muslim youth on suspicion of terrorist links, but here he repeated the official line, telling the Hindustan Times in September that he believed the attack was masterminded by Shahid Bilal. (He later published a rejoinder in Etamad, a newspaper run by his brother Burhanuddin, claiming that his statement had been distorted.)

As holes emerged in the initial official account of the blast, Asaduddin changed tack, speaking in the state assembly to demand the jailed men’s release. He and Akbaruddin also made public statements to the same effect. But many in Hyderabad, particularly young Muslims, were disappointed that the AIMIM could not spur immediate government action.

The men were released on bail after one and a half years, carrying with them stories of illegal detention, torture and coerced confessions. The AIMIM was quick to claim credit, but not everyone was convinced. “They were nowhere,” Lateef Mohammed Khan, the general secretary of the Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee, a Hyderabad-based human rights organisation that campaigned for the men’s release, told me in March. But “when it became clear that the youth are being released, they appeared, flaunting the bond money.” He also alleged that Asaduddin had unnecessarily hurried up the burials of those killed in the explosion. One of the arrested men told me that his parents had visited Asaduddin after he was arrested to ask for help, but were shrugged off.

In 2010, investigators linked the Mecca Masjid bombing to Hindutva militants. The falsely accused men received government compensation for their ordeal—a first in all of India for a terror-related faux pas by the police.

But what some see as Asaduddin’s pussyfooting, others see as a desire to keep the peace. “He helps,” a senior police officer in Hyderabad told me, asking to remain anonymous. “He helps soothe tempers.” The officer recalled an instance in the old city in the early 2000s, when a Ganesh pandal collapsed and crushed a Muslim ragpicker to death. If not handled carefully, the situation could have set off communal rioting. Asaduddin, he said, “helped bury the boy before dawn.”

But Asaduddin isn’t always so careful to play down communal tension. On the night of 1 November 2012, talk spread that the caretakers of the Bhagyalakshmi temple in old Hyderabad were expanding it. The temple sits at one corner of the Charminar, a sixteenth-century Muslim monument, and has been a cause of contention for years. Some Hindus claim that it predates the Charminar, even though photos suggest it didn’t exist until the 1960s. The temple’s caretakers claimed that they were only decorating it for Diwali, but the AIMIM claimed there was a plan to enlarge it under the guidance of Andhra Pradesh’s Congress chief minister, Nallari Kiran Kumar Reddy.

Akbaruddin and his MLAs organised a rally in protest, and were detained. There was sporadic violence across the city. Within days, the AIMIM announced that it was withdrawing its support for the Congress in the state and at the centre, ending the two parties’ long association.

The Charminar dispute triggered the separation, but disagreements may have been brewing behind the scenes for some time. In July, Akbaruddin had written to Kiran Kumar Reddy to ask that a plot of land be alloted to a party-affiliated educational trust. The following month, Asaduddin repeated this request in a letter of his own. Also in August, Burhanuddin wrote to the chief minister, asking for land to be leased to his newspaper. And in September, Akbaruddin wrote to ask that the state government transfer to the AIMIM’s medical college a plot of land leased to a charitable hospital. According to government records, the chief minister directed government officials to look into these requests and brief him. Eventually, the government turned the Owaisis’ appeals down.

“We are disappointed with the state government’s inaction over several minority issues,” Asaduddin told the media. “We will expose the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh.” With elections coming up in 2014, he suggested a new alliance with the YSR Congress, led by the disgruntled former Congressman YS Jaganmohan Reddy. “Jagan Reddy is a friend,” he said. “Kiran Kumar Reddy was a friend.”

More tumult followed. In late December 2012, Akbaruddin delivered a vicious rant at a massive rally in the district of Adilabad, about 300 kilometres north of Hyderabad. “These people have so many gods,” he said. “Ram, Laxman, Durga, Laxmi … They have such strange names. I don’t want to ruin this sacred gathering by taking their names.” He also compared the numbers of Indian Muslims and Hindus, and said, “Take the police away for 15 minutes, then we’ll show you who has more courage and strength.”

Footage of the Adilabad speech was soon all over television news and social media, and Akbaruddin faced charges of hate speech and inciting communal discord. He left for London, citing health reasons. But the matter did not die down, and pressure for his arrest kept mounting.

Akbaruddin returned to Hyderabad in the early hours of 7 January 2013. Thousands of supporters gathered to meet him at the airport, and formed a rally to escort him home. Police arrived, but he evaded them, still citing this health. He was arrested a day later.

Now, Kiran Kumar Reddy also dug up old cases against other AIMIM leaders—including one against Asaduddin from eight years earlier, in which he was accused of obstructing officials from demolishing a mosque in Medak district. Asaduddin was briefly imprisoned. The AIMIM shut down the old city of Hyderabad in protest, and bandhs also followed elsewhere, including in Adilabad.

Asaduddin spent two weeks in jail. Once out on bail, he went to meet the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi. What was said at the meeting has never been made clear, but, a few weeks later, Akbaruddin was let go on bail too. He had spent 40 days in jail. The case against him is still in the courts. (I asked to interview Kiran Kumar Reddy about the events of this time, but he did not respond.)

The split with the Congress meant that the AIMIM could more openly vie for Muslim support outside Hyderabad, particularly in areas where the community traditionally leant towards the grand old party. Through late 2012 and early 2013, the AIMIM had already established a presence in municipal bodies in Maharashtra and Karnataka, especially in areas that were once part of Hyderabad state. This served as a prelude to the party’s push for seats in the Maharashtra election in 2014.

In Andhra Pradesh, the AIMIM contested 35 assembly seats and six Lok Sabha seats in 2014. It managed to win exactly what it already had: its seven assembly seats, and the Lok Sabha seat from Hyderabad. Soon after the vote, the state of Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh, taking Hyderabad with it. The YSR Congress had its stronghold in what remained of Andhra Pradesh, and the AIMIM now partnered with the Telangana Rashtra Samithi—even though it had earlier opposed the TRS’s demands for Telangana statehood.

{FOUR}

ASADUDDIN’S RE-ELECTION IN 2014 extended his time in the Lok Sabha into a third term. This was crucial as the AIMIM looked to expand from its Hyderabad base. No matter how the party had fared in the city over the last decade, anything it did there got it, at best, sporadic flashes of national attention—and that mostly when it stirred up controversy. But in Delhi, Asaduddin had managed to use his position in parliament and access to the national media to maximum advantage.

Asaduddin came to Delhi at a fortuitous time. His election to the Lok Sabha in 2004 coincided with the surprise defeat of the previous BJP-led government, which brought the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance to power. The AIMIM joined the UPA, allowing Owaisi, as a member of the ruling government, unprecedented exposure. Ever since, he has commanded outsized attention in proportion to his party’s numerical presence in parliament—perhaps more so than any other Indian politician today. This has only been helped by the BJP’s projection of him as a prime antagonist since it returned to power in 2014.

Part of this is down to Asaduddin’s performance in the parliament itself. In 2014, he was one of 12 MPs to receive the Sansad Ratna, an annual award from a civil-society group, for top parliamentarians as judged by their attendance and participation in debates. Asaduddin is known for his eloquent and often fiery speeches on the parliament floor, which are popular online. It helps that he is the only prominent Muslim in an assembly where the community is badly underrepresented. In 2014, for instance, only 23 Muslims were elected to the 545-seat Lok Sabha. With Muslims accounting for 14.2 percent of the population, the proportional number of representatives, not counting the 133 seats reserved for specific other communities, would be about 60.

Beyond the parliament, Asaduddin’s high profile owes much to his relationship with the Delhi-based media. He often brings chefs from Hyderabad to the capital with him, and puts his city’s legendary cuisine to good use. In a Hindustan Times piece denouncing Akbaruddin’s Adilabad speech in 2013, the journalist Rajdeep Sardesai could not help but note how Asaduddin, during parliament sessions,

invites journalists and fellow MPs for a Hyderabadi daawat and is always a gracious host. Since my gastronomic habits are distinctly secular (I have had crabs and red wine with the Thackerays and jalebis with VHP leaders), the haleem at Owaisi’s lunch is always a delight.

Last month, I spoke with Asaduddin again at his official residence in Delhi, at 34 Ashoka Road, where he hosts these feasts. He told me he always keeps his door open. “It’s part of Muslim culture,” he said. “If a guest comes, whoever comes—even if an enemy comes—we will serve them. What’s wrong with that?”

Asaduddin is regularly invited to prime-time talk shows, where he is expected to represent the Muslim view. He has consistently been a hit in this role, though not always because popular audiences approve of him. “Hindu interlocutors want to dominate him, and it is difficult to dominate him because he has logic,” the journalist Saeed Naqvi told me. “Therefore, they find him extremely difficult to handle. Since politics and public mood is today shaped by two or three TRP-chasing channels, and in that he is very effective, that is why he is disliked.”

Asaduddin has not shied away from the projection of himself as a national Muslim spokesperson. He has increasingly taken it upon himself to weigh in on issues affecting Muslims well beyond his electoral constituency. In July, Asaduddin announced that the AIMIM would provide legal aid to five Hyderabadi men arrested on charges of associating with the Islamic State—something that prompted charges of sedition against him. This was part of his long-standing criticism of Indian security and intelligence agencies’ habit of arresting Muslim men on unfounded terrorism charges. Subsequently, Asaduddin loudly denounced the Islamic State at a public meeting, calling its members “dogs of hell.” He has repeatedly spoken out against creating a uniform civil code, which would abolish special personal laws for Muslims, pointing to how other groups, such as the Nagas and Mizos, are also allowed exceptional provisions under the constitution. He has also made headlines for saying that the government should scrap its subsidy for hajj pilgrims, and use the money on scholarships for Muslim girls instead.

But for all his suave manners, Asaduddin continues to be dogged by uncomfortable questions over his style of politics. For instance, there are the concerns over the AIMIM’s use of violence. Just this February, AIMIM cadres assaulted members of the Congress’s Andhra Pradesh leadership in the run-up to municipal polls in Hyderabad—Shabir Ali, a senior Congress leader, alleged that Asaduddin took direct part—and were involved in at least four cases of hooliganism on the last day of campaigning and on voting day. There are also the worries about the AIMIM stoking communalism. These have not been helped by Asaduddin’s stubborn defence of Akbaruddin regarding the hate-speech case he faces for his remarks in Adilabad. To date, there has been no apology from the AIMIM for Akbaruddin’s speech.

I put these issues before Asaduddin in Delhi. On allegations of the AIMIM’s hooliganism, he told me, “No case has been proven. Sab khatam. It’s all lies. … It’s all political.” About the case against Akbaruddin, he said, “Let the court decide. Why should someone, sitting in a TV studio, or in an interview or in a column, decide that?”

There are other questions too, which go beyond just the public face of the AIMIM’s politics. In April 2015, in the village of Aler in Telangana, police shot dead five alleged Islamists in their custody while taking them to court, claiming to have acted in self-defence. Lateef Mohammed Khan, of the Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee, told me when we spoke in Hyderabad that Owaisi had tried, just as he allegedly had after the Mecca Masjid bombing, to hurry up the burials of the victims—three of whom were from Hyderabad.

Asaduddin denied these allegations, both in the case of the Aler encounter and of the Mecca Masjid blast. “How can I stop someone if they say, ‘We will do it in the afternoon or evening, our relatives are coming,’” he said. “I can’t say no to them, I have to go along with their wishes.” He also insisted that he had worked to ensure justice for those detained after the blast. As for accusations that he conspires with the police, he said, “I don’t help any police … but as far as I am concerned and my party is concerned, we have always tried to ensure that peace prevails.”

Other suspicions have come up over the AIMIM’s alleged hand in shady land deals. The most dramatic instance of this came in 2011, when Akbaruddin was ambushed and shot in his constituency. Security guards of a fellow AIMIM MLA fired back, killing one of the assailants—a relative of Mohammad Pehalwan, a real-estate dealer, who was reportedly angry over a property dispute. The attack left Akbaruddin hospitalised for 19 days.

Earlier this year, there were conspiratorial whispers in Hyderabad regarding the AIMIM’s involvement in the sudden removal of a government officer involved with administering waqf properties—mortmain holdings, donated by Muslims to endow religious or charitable institutions. Telangana is a waqf-rich state, and Hyderabad a waqf-rich city, and the AIMIM’s opponents have accused the party of abetting, and benefitting from, the misuse of waqf land. On 22 February—a day before he was due to meet Telangana’s chief minister, Kalvakuntla Chandrasekhar Rao of the Telugana Rashtra Samithi—Asaduddin wrote to the state’s chief secretary to ask for the removal of the director of minority welfare, MJ Akbar (not to be confused with the BJP politician of the same name). Akbar’s responsibilities included serving as the competent authority of the state waqf board, and as the survey commissioner for waqf properties. He had a reputation as an upright officer, but Asaduddin accused him of misusing government money, underutilising funds for minorities, and even using more government diesel than was allotted to him. Akbar was transferred shortly afterwards.

As it emerged, Akbar had earlier issued notices to multiple people and institutions for squatting on waqf land. Among them was the Dargah Shah Khamosh, located just a few hundred metres from the AIMIM’s headquarters. The dargah’s main caretaker is Akbar Nizamuddin—the chairman of the AIMIM-affiliated Darussalam Cooperative Bank, and an officer on several other institutions linked to the party. He is also the head of the Jamia Nizamia, an influential Hyderabadi seminary, and has long been crucial in marshalling clerics behind Asaduddin. In 2014, Akbar Nizamuddin was suspended as the dargah’s caretaker after investigators found that he had sold waqf land. He was also accused of collecting rent on waqf properties, the proceeds from which should have been administered by the waqf board.

Asaduddin dismissed suspicions of wrongdoing by his party and associates, or that he had unfairly targeted Akbar. He said that although the charges against Akbar Nizamuddin are several years old, “Nothing has happened. It was mischief done by the waqf board.” He reminded me that the matter came up while Kiran Kumar Reddy was in power, and after the AIMIM had withdrawn its support for the Congress. “The ball is in their court. Let them prove it.”

The AIMIM’s rough-and-tumble politics, which has proven so fruitful for it in Hyderabad, draws no end of criticism from outside observers. The veteran politician Arif Mohammad Khan told me, “If these people were honestly communal, I would have said it’s a problem of mindset. But their communalism is commercial communalism. They are traders. Ask them only one thing: how much money do they take for admission in their medical college?” Khan, whose decades-long career started with the Congress and ended with him quitting the BJP, was scathing of the AIMIM on multiple fronts. The party’s language, he said, “doesn’t match with our constitution. This constitution doesn’t allow Muslim and Hindu politics.”

Indresh Kumar, an RSS leader who heads the Sangh-affiliated Muslim Rashtriya Manch, told me that Asaduddin “gives some bizarre statements,” and that Muslim leaders should think about how to “live like true Indians.” The use of the community as a vote bank, he said, created “more fundamentalist Muslims, more communalists.”

Even more dispassionate commentators, such as Saeed Naqvi, take issue with the AIMIM’s ways. “Their politics is basically that of a Muslim ghetto,” he told me. “There is no such thing as a Muslim leader in India, and there should not be.”

Adnan Farooqui, a professor of political science at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia university who has followed the AIMIM closely for many years, offered a more nuanced take on the party’s ways. “Its initial success in providing, or at least promising, physical security to the Muslims of the old city is still paying off,” he told me. “They have not been able to do what they have been promising”—bring in lasting prosperity—“but they have done at least something.” And that, he said, connects to “the larger problem of Indian Muslims: that parties can benefit by doing so little. The community is still demanding the basic necessities.”

What puts Asaduddin in “a category of his own,” Farooqui continued, “is that he is asking for more now. And here he is not asking for more madrasas, he is asking for more schools, and more primary health centres, asking for abolition of the hajj subsidy.” Asaduddin, Farooqui stressed, “is not asking for special treatment. He is only asking for what the constitution guarantees.”

Farooqui argued that the image of Asaduddin as a polarising communal leader has been exaggerated. He put part of the blame for this on the popular media. “For 50 minutes he will talk about substantive issues”—education for girls, constitutional rights—but “no one would focus on these issues. But the last 15 minutes, when he is addressing his political agenda, that gets highlighted.” Much of the talk about polarisation, he said, amounts to “blackmailing tactics against Muslims by mainstream political parties.”

Asaduddin told me almost the same thing. “As long as I was with the Congress I was secular, but the moment we left the UPA at the centre and in Andhra Pradesh we immediately became politically untouchable,” he said. “If you are with them you are holy, and the moment you oppose them you become untouchable, you become communal, you become someone’s agent.”

He also dismissed the common accusation that the AIMIM is “the RSS of the Muslims.” “I do not believe in, do not aspire to, make India a theocratic country,” he told me. “I want India to remain a pluralistic and diverse country. … The RSS and all these right-wing groups want India to become a theocratic country. This is the basic difference.” As for the persistent accusations that he has collaborated with the RSS or the BJP—including the one by the Congress leader Digvijaya Singh, during the Bihar campaign—he found them laughable. When I asked if he has ever spoken with Amit Shah, he said, “Yes, I met him at Digvijaya Singh’s house in Delhi. And if you want the menu also, I will send you the food menu.” He told me he has never met Narendra Modi.

In occasionally testing, even if cautiously, the limits of what has traditionally constituted Muslim politics, Asaduddin has the capacity to surprise. In December last year, the Hyderabad municipal corporation issued an eviction notice to Lamakaan, a cultural centre located in one of the city’s poshest neighbourhoods, and with a reputation for its liberal leanings. The centre has held events on such things as LGBT issues, tribal rights and conservation, and has often faced opposition for it. Ashhar Farhan, who runs Lamakaan, told me that the eviction notice was prompted by an old couple living across the street complaining that “women smoke in the building.”

Farhan wrote about the notice on Facebook. To his surprise, the first person to respond to his post was Asaduddin. The AIMIM leader had attended Lamakaan events several times, just to listen quietly, but his politics, Farhan said, “clashes with the politics of this place.” Farhan had also written against the AIMIM—especially after an infamous incident in 2007, when a group of the party’s MLAs attacked Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi writer and vocal critic of Islam, when she visited Hyderabad to launch a translation of her work.

After the Facebook post, Farhan said, Asaduddin tweeted about the issue, and took it up with the chief minister’s son. “Within minutes, everything was sorted out.”

ONE WAY Asaduddin is pushing the frontiers of Muslim politics is by courting Dalit voters. In the Maharashtra election in 2014, the AIMIM tried out a new slogan: “Jai Bheem, Jai Meem”—“Bheem” for the Dalit hero Bhimrao Ambedkar, and “Meem,” phonetically, for MIM. I saw a poster with the same slogan on my visit to Darussalam. Before the Bihar election, Asaduddin told a newspaper, “I definitely see a future where Muslims and Dalits should come together socially and politically.” And this January, after the suicide of the Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula on the University of Hyderabad campus, he was one of the first politicians to visit protesting students at the university, and also Vemula’s mother.

The AIMIM has some history of Dalit engagement. It fielded Dalit candidates during the days of Asaduddin’s father and grandfather, but this was rare and largely for appearances. In the late 1980s and 1990s, though, when the party had the numbers to appoint the mayor of Hyderabad, three of the five people it elevated to the post were Dalits. Under Asaduddin’s leadership, it has continued to field Dalit candidates in small but noticeable numbers—especially in municipal elections, where they have had some success. In assembly elections—as in Maharashtra, where it fielded Dalits in five of the 24 constituencies it contested—no Dalit has yet won on an AIMIM ticket, even in the party’s home state.

I spoke to Kancha Ilaiah Shephard, a noted scholar of caste issues, about Asaduddin’s prospects with Dalit voters. Asaduddin, he said, is “willing to address ideological issues of non-Muslims,” and has a politics that “runs counter to Hindutva nationalism.” Muslim leaders from mainstream political parties have, by and large, not taken any ideological position on caste, he said, but Asaduddin has. The AIMIM leader still has a long way to go in winning Dalits’ confidence, but “he seems to approve of Ambedkar’s role more than Gandhi’s role in India. That is common ground.”

As part of this strategy, Asaduddin has actively reached out to young Dalit leaders. At a small gathering in Hyderabad before the 2014 election, he met Naliganti Sharath—a Dalit activist at Osmania University, who took part in the Telangana movement, has organised against Hindutva, and has spoken out for women’s and transgender rights. At the gathering, Sharath sang against prohibitions on beef. Asaduddin “liked my song,” he told me at his university hostel, “and asked me to visit him if I wished.”

Sharath did, and Asaduddin offered him a ticket for the upcoming Telangana assembly election. “I took some time, asked my seniors for advice, before I said yes,” Sharath said. But he had a condition. “I said I will fight against the state BJP chief, G Kishan Reddy,” in a constituency in Hyderabad.

Sharath remembered Asaduddin’s reaction. “He smiled and said, ‘Be realistic. It’s your first election.’” But the young man was adamant, and Asaduddin relented. “It was a fight between Rama and Ravana,” Sharath joked.

Sharath didn’t stand much of a chance. But the fear that he might woo Dalit voters away made the BJP leader go to Dalits’ homes and “touch their feet,” Sharath said. Seeing that, “Asaduddin-bhai hugged me, and said, ‘Bhai, hum jeet gaye.’” (Brother, we have won.)

Sharath received almost 19,000 votes, compared to Kishan Reddy’s over 81,000. Still, the AIMIM succeeded in catching Dalits’ attention.

And that, for now, seems to be Asaduddin’s most realistic goal. The AIMIM’s next electoral battleground is Uttar Pradesh—with 38.5 million Muslims, comprising 19.3 percent of the population—which votes for its state assembly early next year. Shephard told me, “In Uttar Pradesh, he may not get votes, but he will get ideological footing.” Asaduddin would perhaps settle for that. He is fond of repeating the Dalit leader Kanshi Ram’s line that “The first election is for losing, the second election is for making someone else lose, the third election is for winning.”

In Delhi, Asaduddin told me the AIMIM is open to alliances in Uttar Pradesh, and that the party’s state president “is in touch with some like-minded leaders of Dalits and some parties.” But, he added, “It would be wrong on my part to even talk about an alliance with this party or that party. It is too early to say anything about that.”

In his comments on Uttar Pradesh, Asaduddin has been critical of the Congress, the BJP and the state’s ruling Samajwadi Party—leaving only the Bahujan Samaj Party, which champions the Dalit cause, as a potential partner. Another hint that the AIMIM is trying to woo Dalits came this February, when it put forward a Dalit candidate in an assembly by-election in the state.

But the BSP’s leader, Mayawati, has not shown any sign of reciprocating interest. Meanwhile, the Samajwadi Party, whose electoral strategy relies heavily on Muslim votes, appears intent on keeping Asaduddin out, and has denied permission for several AIMIM rallies.

Naqvi also told me that the AIMIM’s current chances in Uttar Pradesh are very slim. His advice to the party was to diversify its appeal. “You cannot operate from a ghetto,” he said, and you cannot go national “unless you appeal to the Hindus also.” Even Indian Muslims, he said, are not monolithic. “Bengali Muslims are different. Tilak Rai Muslims are separate. Assamese are separate.” Asaduddin “has linked them all up in the English language on social media,” he said, but that does not amount to actual social integration. If Asaduddin embraces a more secular and integrationist politics, Naqvi said, “if he keeps aside his topi, he will be acceptable to me as well.”

Farooqui told me he “will be surprised if the party succeeds even in opening its account in Uttar Pradesh.” In Maharashtra, he said, “they had local presence, which is not the case in Uttar Pradesh,” and some Dalits voted for the AIMIM in Maharashtra “because the traditional claimants of Dalit votes—like the Nationalist Congress Party, at least in Aurangabad—had become obsolete or weakened.” Establishing a Dalit base for the AIMIM in Uttar Pradesh would have to mean Dalit voters moving away from Mayawati’s BSP, and not gravitating instead to the BJP. “That’s a big thing to expect.”

Farooqui argued that the AIMIM’s hold even in places where it has Muslim votes is partly down to the absence of other parties with a strong traditional claim on them. The party’s national prospects, he said, will “depend on the Congress party. If at all there is a revival of the Congress, especially in northern India, I am not sure where Owaisi will stand.”

AT ONE STAGE in my conversation with Asaduddin at Darussalam in mid March, the other journalist in the room, from a national news website, pushed him to speak about the latest controversy spinning around him. Just days earlier, at a rally in Maharashtra, Asaduddin had waded into the debate on nationalism gripping the country in the wake of allegedly seditious sloganeering at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University in February. Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the RSS, had recently said that “the time has come when we have to tell the new generation to chant ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’”—Hail Mother India. Asaduddin told his audience in Maharashtra that he refused to repeat the slogan, which has taken on Hindutva connotations. “What are you going to do, Bhagwat sahab?” he said. “I won’t utter that even if you put a knife to my throat. … Nowhere in the constitution does it say that one has to say ‘Bharat Mata ki jai.’”

Now, Asaduddin explained his view that “Bharat” stood for the Indian nation as a secular entity, but “Bharat Mata” deified it, thus running counter to the tenets of Islam. Muslims, he said, have long favoured the nationalist slogan “Jai Hind” as an alternative.

He picked up his phone, and after a brief search pulled up a text by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the seminal Hindutva ideologue, describing his view of Indian Muslims. Asaduddin read it out:

Ye, who by race, by blood, by culture, by nationality possess almost all the essentials of Hindutva and had been forcibly snatched out of our ancestral home by the hand of violence—ye, have only to render wholehearted love to our common Mother and recognize her not only as Fatherland (Pitribhu) but even as a Holyland (punyabhu); and ye would be most welcome to the Hindu fold.

Putting the phone aside, he asked whether, in light of such views, he was wrong in refusing to bow to Hindutva impositions. He added, wryly, “Aap bole to chamatkar. Hum bole to hahakar.” (What they say gets taken seriously. What I say becomes a joke.)

The interview carried on for over an hour and a half before Asaduddin wrapped things up, with a promise that we would meet again. Meanwhile, more people had gathered on the verandah to meet him. As Asaduddin stepped out, about half a dozen media people pushed forward. “No, no. I won’t talk,” he said. A few voices asked him for at least one sound bite. “Ok,” he agreed. “No questions on ‘Bharat Mata ki jai.’”

Moments later, he was back to hearing grievances and petitions from his constituents. A group of bearded, middle-aged men asked him to intervene in a land dispute involving a mosque. He reacted furiously. “Go get orders from court,” he told them. The men persisted. “I don’t want to get involved in the case. Go get orders from the court, otherwise people will say AIMIM men have squatted on the property.”

The time struck 1.10 pm. Asaduddin headed back inside Darussalam to offer the noon prayer.

The version of this article in the September 2016 print issue mistakenly shortened the name of Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd to Kancha Ilaiah, and mistakenly described him as a Dalit scholar rather than a scholar of caste issues; misidentified the Telangana Rashtra Samithi as the Telugu Rashtriya Samiti in one instance; and misidentified the Nationalist Congress Party as the National Congress Party in one instance. The Caravan regrets the errors.