All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaddudin Owaisi has predicted that there would come a day when a hijab-clad woman will become the Prime Minister of India.
“Inshallah, if a Muslim is to become the PM of India, it will be in the form of a woman wearing a hijab. The time will come,” he said in an interview with Mint.
As Telangana gears up for the Lok Sabha elections in the fourth phase on Monday, May 13, which has 17 Lok Sabha seats, including Hyderabad, an important parliamentary seat the AIMIM has held since 1984, Owaisi dismissed the allegations that AIMIM is helping BJP.
“When a person like me or my party come forward and says we want our share, we immediately hear, ‘Oh, no, you’re helping BJP.’ I fail to understand this kind of hypocrisy,” he said, adding, “Where we are contesting alone or as part of an alliance, we’re asking people to vote for us. Where we are not, we are openly saying please defeat BJP,” he was quoted by the Mint.
When asked about the contest with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s candidate Madhavi Latha, who has openly declared a ‘war’ against Owaisi, the veteran politician exuded confidence about his win. ” We will ensure that we’ll work hard and if people decide, inshallah, we’ll win. If not, we’ll be laying a strong foundation for the future of our party,” he said.
He remarked on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent hate speech in the Rajasthan election campaign where the latter described Muslims ‘infiltrators’, Owaisi said he was not surprised by Modi’s remark as it is in his DNA.
“That’s his original language. That’s his originality. They hate Muslims. That is the real Hindutva ideology. He’s gone back on his original agenda of spewing venom, creating divisions, creating suspicion about Muslims … saying Muslim women give birth to more children, which is all rubbish and nonsense. A pack of lies,” he said.
AIMIM has been conspicuously silent over a possible alliance with the INDIA bloc in the upcoming elections. Owaisi, however, claimed that they had offered to ally with the alliance but received no response.
“Our Maharashtra president Imtiyaz Jaleel publicly said thrice that let us talk to make AIMIM a part of the INDIA bloc. Now, the other side has not responded at all. For us, it is not the end of the world if one does not want to have an alliance with us. We will continue our political journey with or without alliance,” he said.
The statement comes after Owaisi indirectly asked the public to vote for Congress candidates in Telangana for the Lok Sabha election, with the exception of Hyderabad parliamentary constituency. This is a major departure from his earlier stance, which has been against the grand old party. This was the first time the AIMIM did not support the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), which it considered a friendly party during its decade-long rule.
In the Telangana Assembly elections last year, Congress leaders had reached out to the AIMIM to work together.
At the AIMIM’s final public meeting for the Lok Sabha election campaign at Khilwat, Hyderabad on May 11, Owaisi appealed to voters to vote for Congress.
In Hyderabad, though many candidates have filed their nominations, the main contest is between AIMIM’s Asaduddin Owaisi and BJP’s Madhavi Latha. The AIMIM has held the Hyderabad Lok Sabha seat since 1984. The Congress has also fielded its Hyderabad district president Sameer Waliullah, while the BRS has nominated Gaddam Srinivas.
