AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi during a door-to-door election campaign ahead of the Telangana Assembly elections. (PTI)
The party, headquartered in Hyderabad, contested only nine seats of which it won seven. However, among the seven, there was a tense fight in two seats — Nampally and Yakutpura
The party, headquartered in Hyderabad, contested only nine seats of which it won seven. However, among the seven, there was a tense fight in two seats — Nampally and Yakutpura.
The counting process in these two seats had party leaders watching with bated breath as their Nampally candidate Md Majid Khan beat INC candidate Md Feroz Khan by a narrow margin of 2,037 votes and Yakutpura candidate Jaffar Hussain beat Majlis Bachao Tehreek’s (MBT) Amjed Ullah Khan by only 878 votes. While Majid secured 62,185 votes, Feroz received 60,148 votes. Jaffar won 46,153 votes, while Amjed Ullah received 45,275 votes. Winning two seats by such narrow margins indicates that MIM has some formidable rivals to beat at its own turf.
Feroz Khan’s near-miss has made a section of the winning Congress unit demand that he should be inducted in the state’s new cabinet. Since no Muslim candidate from the Congress has won any seat, some leaders are demanding that Feroz should be in the cabinet to represent the minority community. In the 2018 assembly elections, he had contested against MIM’s Jaffar Hussain, who fought from Yakutpura this year, and lost by 6,675 votes.
MBT is an offshoot of AIMIM
Amjed Ullah Khan, who lost Yakutpura by 878 votes, is the spokesperson of MBT. He is the son of Amanullah Khan who founded MBT after he had differences with the then AIMIM president Sultan Salahauddin Owaisi. He had protested against the lack of autonomy in MIM and formed MBT as an alternative party in Old City.
Amjed has always been proactive in raising his voice against the AIMIM.
In a video released after the polling, he accused the MIM of many unfair practices. “MIM bought votes at one particular polling booth, created obstacles in the distribution of voter slips to houses which they suspected would not vote for them. There were also duplicate votes in many households, and the government machinery was also on their side,” he alleged in a video.
Throughout the year, Amjed had pointed out how the BRS government had failed Muslims. He talked about the Alair encounter, demolition of mosques while building the new Secretariat and destruction of Wakf properties in Telangana.
