Notwithstanding the complete wipe-out in West Bengal the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) on Monday (June 28) announced that it would be contesting on 100 seats in the coming Assembly election in Uttar Pradesh.
Disclosing this information, its chief Asaduddin Owaisi ruled out that his party has any alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party.
However, he dropped enough hint to say that AIMIM would join the 10-party front, Bhagidari Sankalp Morcha. The leading light of the Morcha is Om Prakash Rajbhar of Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party. Rajbhar, whose party contested the 2017 election in alliance with the BJP, resigned from the Yogi Adityanath cabinet on the eve of 2019 Lok Sabha election.
Anyway, independent political observers are not attaching much importance to the AIMIM leader’s announcement as in 2017 election in the state it contested on 38 seats and lost in all of them. In 37 of them it even lost its deposit. In all, the AIMIM could win only 0.2 per cent votes in Uttar Pradesh last time.
In West Bengal recently and in Jharkhand in Dec 2019 the party failed disastrously.
It was only in Bihar last year that it could win five seats, but that too only because most of them who won were reasonably powerful leaders in their own constituencies having connection with other mainstream parties and switched over to the AIMIM only when denied ticket. Most of them were former MLAs and had the potential to win even as independent candidates.
UP watchers are of the view that there is absolutely no scope whatsoever for AIMIM to win any seat on its own. The party can do better only when it gives ticket to reasonably strong political turncoats from other parties as it did in Bihar. If not, it is likely to be routed as it happened in West Bengal and Jharkhand.
