The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) maintained its grip on Hyderabad politics, retaining seven Assembly seats in the Telangana capital. The party's floor leader in the dissolved Assembly, Akbaruddin Owaisi, was re-elected from Chandrayangutta constituency for the fifth consecutive term.
He defeated his nearest rival Sayyad Shahezadi of the BJP by over 80,000 votes. In 2014, Akbaruddin got 59.19% of the vote share with 80,393 votes while the runner up, Dr Khayam Khan from the MBT got only 15.55% of the vote share with 21,119 votes.
This time, the turnout in the constituency remained low at 46.11%.
The other winners of the AIMIM are Mumtaz Ahmed Khan (Charminar), Ahmed Pasha Quadri (Yakutpura), Jaffar Hussain (Nampalli), Ahmed Bin Abdullah Balala (Malakpet), Moazzam Khan (Bahadurpura) and Kausar Mohiuddin (Karwan). They were all members of the dissolved Assembly.
The AIMIM had fielded eight candidates, all in Hyderabad, and declared support to the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) in the rest of the state. The party's eighth candidate Mirza Rahmat Baig, however, failed to win the Rajendranagar seat, despite intensive campaigning by AIMIM chief and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi himself.
A day ahead of the results, Owaisi reached Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao's official residence on his motorbike for a luncheon meeting with him. Before his meeting with KCR, Owaisi tweeted that he was going to meet Telangana's "next Chief Minister".
"I want to show how peaceful Hyderabad is to those who wanted to drive us away and cut our throat," said Owaisi, after a three-hour meeting. He was referring to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Telangana BJP leader Raja Singh's threats.
Meanwhile, speaking to the media on Tuesday, KCR said that he had Owaisi had discussed national unity of the Muslim community and had looked at means to organize them and ensure their upliftment.
"Asaduddin Owaisi is a good intellectual who participates in each and every debate in Parliament. I appreciate him because he is not a fundamentalist. He is a secular political leader," KCR said.
IANS Inputs