After winning five seats in the recently concluded Bihar Assembly elections, US-educated lawyer and four-term MP from Hyderabad, Owaisi has announced his party will contest the upcoming Bengal Assembly elections.
Ahead of the much anticipated West Bengal Assembly polls scheduled for the next year, AIMIM Chief Asaduddin Owaisi has been warming up to the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
Owaisi has proposed a pre-poll pact with Trinamool, saying that his party will help the ruling TMC defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party in next year's state Assembly elections.
After winning five seats in the recently concluded Bihar Assembly elections, US-educated lawyer and four-term MP from Hyderabad, Owaisi has announced his party will contest the upcoming Bengal Assembly elections.
Asaduddin Owaisi's statement comes at a time when Mamata Banerjee has openly criticised AIMIM calling it 'outsider' who will 'harass and terrorise people'. She has also urged the people of the state to 'resist the outsiders'.
On the other hand, only a few days ago Owaisi had said that the social and economic condition of Muslims living in Bengal is 'worse than many places in the country', adding that the community is almost alienated under Banerjee’s government.
'I have empirical evidence to prove that. And I also have statistics to say this,' he had said. All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen party has not contested any election so far in West Bengal.
AIMIM seeks to focus on the minority-dominated districts of Murshidabad, North Dinajpur and Malda in West Bengal.
In the 2016 West Bengal Assembly polls, the Congress-CPM alliance had won 34 out of the 76 seats in these districts.
Owaisi’s party has been subject to some scathing attacks from multiple quarters ever since the results of the Bihar polls came out.
Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury had called AIMIM a B-team of the BJP whose aim is to divide Muslim votes and damage other 'secular parties'.
However he had been quick to add that West Bengal has been rejecting the politics of polarisation and communalism since independence.
CPM and Congress held a two-hour long meeting on Tuesday night to draw out its strategy as the news of AIMIM contesting in the West Bengal polls emerged.
Both the parties are planning to hold outreach programmes to take leaders and eminent personalities from the minority community into confidence.
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 "Owaisi proposes pre-poll pact to Mamata Banerjee's TMC")
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