All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief and MP Asaduddin Owaisi on Wednesday said that his party’s Bihar unit chief, Akhtarul Iman, has written a letter to RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav regarding a possible pre-poll alliance in Bihar.
During an interaction with reporters in Kishanganj, Owaisi said that Akhtarul Iman told Yadav that the AIMIM is ready to contest on six seats of the 243 in the polls due by November.
The alliance currently has RJD as the major partner, with Congress as the second, and many other parties too.
“Akhtarul Iman has written a letter to the LoP here (Tejashwi Yadav), and we have said through the media that AIMIM is ready for an alliance. Akhtarul Iman has also written that they can give us six seats,” Owaisi said, according to ANI.
“It is not up to them to decide. If they do not do this, people of Bihar would see who wants to make the BJP succeed and who wants to stop them. So, the decision is up to the people of Bihar. We have shouldered our responsibility…” he added.
Asaduddin Owaisi is on a five-day Nyay Yatra in the Seemanchal belt of Bihar from September 23-27 to mobilise the cadre.
“Over the last 60 years, the fate of the people of Seemanchal was being decided by someone sitting in Patna. But this won’t happen now. People of Seemanchal will decide for themselves,” he said at a rally in Kishanganj, according to ANI.
As reported by HT, Owaisi will hold over 24 public meetings across Kishanganj, Araria, Katihar and Purnea, districts with a significant Muslim population. The campaign is expected to highlight backwardness, illiteracy, unemployment and poverty in the region.
Party insiders said Owaisi will first target the five constituencies AIMIM won in 2020 to consolidate its base, despite the defection of four MLAs to the RJD in 2022.
AIMIM first entered Bihar politics through Seemanchal in 2015, opening its account in the 2019 bye-election when Qamrul Hoda defeated a Congress candidate for the Kishanganj seat.
The party shocked political observers in 2020 by winning five seats, pushing the RJD to just one in Seemanchal’s 24 constituencies, where Muslims form 40-70% of the population.
But by 2022, four of its MLAs defected to the RJD, raising the latter’s tally in the region to five.
