Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: A campaigner of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) drives a scooter, with the party symbol on it, into a large compound next to Taj Vivanta at Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, formerly Aurangabad, where the party has set up its campaign office.
In peak election season, there is nothing unusual about the site, except that the scooter is sporting the AIMIM’s kite symbol in four different colours — green, saffron, blue and yellow — representing four communities, the Muslims, Marathas, Scheduled Castes and Dhangars.
Inside the makeshift office, an AIMIM volunteer pours water for visitors, wearing a T-shirt with its incumbent MP Imtiaz Jaleel’s smiling picture on it.
Printed on the T-shirt are the words ‘Sarva Dharma Sama Bhaav’ (all religions are equal) with ‘sarva’ written in saffron, ‘dharma’ in green, ‘sama’ in yellow and ‘bhav’ in blue.
Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, a city in Marathwada region, is seeing a motley mix of push and pull factors that have made Maharashtra a unique battleground this Lok Sabha election. These include the demand for Maratha reservation, a clash between two Shiv Senas, the overhang of a change in the city’s name last year, and the presence of a candidate from the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) with leaders from the Opposition, Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance as well as the AIMIM, fearing the VBA could cut into their vote share. The MVA comprises the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar).
Moreover, the city has a history of clashes on communal lines.
In this melee, Jaleel, the only MP of the AIMIM in Maharashtra, is seeking a second term for himself. And his “secular” campaign stands out as one very different from the party’s typical tone and tenor.
“Till 2019, the battle lines in Aurangabad were drawn as ‘khan ya baan’ (Muslims or the Shiv Sena’s symbol of the bow and arrow). That’s not the case anymore. People have seen our MP’s work for every community and are actively coming forward to be associated with our campaign,” Mohammed Shoeb, a city-based AIMIM leader, told ThePrint.
‘Khan or baan’ was a phrase that Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray would liberally use in his election rallies in the city since the 1990s. He used the phrase to pitch Congress as a Muslim-appeasing party, and his Shiv Sena with its hardline Hindutva ideology, as an outfit that can safeguard the Hindu character of the city, which he had colloquially named ‘Sambhajinagar’ after the 1988 civic election. The undivided Shiv Sena had contested polls in the city for the first time and had emerged as the single-largest party.
In this election, Jaleel will take on former MP Chandrakant Khaire from the Shiv Sena (UBT) and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena’s Sandipan Bhumre. The constituency votes on 13 May. The “baan” (bow and arrow symbol) is now officially with the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena, while there is a scramble among all parties to tap the “Khan.”
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A scramble for Muslim votes
Jaleel, a former journalist, first entered the electoral fray in 2014 when he contested the state assembly poll from the Muslim-dominated seat of Aurangabad Central, and won comfortably. The following year, he helped AIMIM grow to the position of the principal opposition party in the Aurangabad civic body.
Then in 2019, Jaleel contested the Lok Sabha election and trounced the undivided Shiv Sena’s Chandrakant Khaire by a slim margin of 4,492 votes. Back then, Jaleel had the support of Prakash Ambedkar’s VBA, which has a following among Scheduled Caste voters.
This time, the VBA has put up its own candidate.
Moreover, the Shiv Sena, which when undivided, would pull a 20 to 30 percent vote share in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, is now split with both factions vying for not only the undivided Sena’s core vote share, but even that of communities who have traditionally not voted for the party.
Khaire, for instance, is actively looking at Muslim votes with the entire Congress machinery in the city campaigning among its core voter base in the city for its MVA ally. There are a few sticky points, though. Locally, Khaire was the personification of the ‘khan ya baan’ philosophy of the undivided Sena, and secondly, the Congress’s Muslim voters were largely never in favour of changing the city’s name from Aurangabad to Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar — an agenda Bal Thackeray had originally set.
Khaire’s team is walking the tightrope trying to appeal to the city’s Muslim community while not alienating its core voter base. Last month, he faced criticism from his political rivals when an old video surfaced of the former MP praising Muslims for maintaining peace during Ramnavni celebrations and talking about the importance of namaz.
On Tuesday, Khaire’s team members were trying to finalise an advertisement to be published in a local Urdu newspaper. The draft had his photo and the party’s symbol with a message in Urdu. “Let’s stick to Marathi or Hindi. We can’t afford to get trolled once again,” a senior member of the team remarked.
Shaikh Yosuf, the Congress city president, told ThePrint, “The Muslim community is a little divided because of the name change issue and the fact that we are asking for votes for a Shiv Sena (UBT) candidate. But, we are explaining to them that this is a fight that goes beyond renaming cities. It is about saving our country and the Constitution, and for that we need to vote for the INDIA alliance.”
According to his estimates, Muslims account for 4.5 lakh of Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar’s total population of 21 lakh.
“One needs at least more than four lakh votes to win this seat. In 2019, Imtiaz Jaleel got about 1.25 lakh votes because of VBA, which will not be in his kitty this time. This time, we feel at least 40 percent of the Muslim community will rally behind the INDIA alliance,” Yosuf said, explaining voter arithmetic over a glass of cold Rooh Afza on a tormentingly hot Tuesday afternoon.
“The AIMIM knows that the Muslim community is not standing behind him (Jaleel) the way it has in the past, so he has given a more secular flavour to his campaign,”Yosuf added.
AIMIM’s ‘secular’ campaign
“Sheher ke andar jo jaati, dharam, mazhab ki deewarein khadi thi, joh deewaron ko todne ka maine kaam kiya hain (I have broken the walls of caste and religion that divided the city),” Jaleel is heard saying towards the beginning of a one-minute video clip that the AIMIM has issued to tell voters “Kaun hain Imtiaz Jaleel? (Who is Imtiaz Jaleel?)”
The video uses several telling images: Jaleel being blessed by a Muslim woman, him being blessed by a Hindu woman, him sitting with Maratha quota leader Manoj Jarange Patil, him standing with members of the Dhangar community while wearing a yellow pheta (head gear), him speaking about fighting elections on development, water shortage and industrialisation and of him speaking in Parliament and so on.
AIMIM campaigners highlight Jaleel’s support for a Maratha quota and for reservation for Dhangars under ST quota, along with a Muslim quota.
Then there are posters where Jaleel is seen hugging and consoling an old Hindu woman who is wailing. The woman in the photo is 78-year-old Sunanda Dattatreya Shinde, a widow who lost all her life’s savings of Rs 23 lakh that she had deposited in a local organisation called ‘Adarsh Pat Sanstha,’ which promised an interest rate of 13 percent.
“There are thousands of depositors like me. Some who invested the compensation they got by giving up their lands for the Nagpur-Mumbai ‘Samruddhi’ expressway, some retired military persons, some poor farmers, some who were saving up for a house. All of us lost all our money. We went to all Hindu politicians for help first, but nobody entertained us. Eventually, only Imtiaz helped,” said Shinde, sitting in her modest house in a locality called Maharashtra Colony with her neighbour friend, the city president for Shiv Sena (UBT), seated next to her.
The depositors still haven’t got their money back. But, they like to talk about how Jaleel is pursuing the issue, from filing a public interest litigation in the Bombay High Court to pressurising the state government to sell the institutions assets and raise money to clear depositors’ accounts.
AIMIM leaders say it is not just the ‘Adarsh Pat Sanstha’ agitation that has earned Jaleel followers from other faiths, pointing to his involvement in demanding hawking zones in the city, and speaking up for those who were promised houses under the Narendra Modi-led government’s schemes, but did not get them. Or how Jaleel had demanded that the then Uddhav Thackeray-led MVA government open the city’s Khadkeshwar temple after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gajendra Borse, another such affected depositor of the ‘Adarsh Pat Sanstha’, was a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) worker for over a decade, but is now enthusiastically campaigning for Jaleel. He even speaks at Jaleel’s rallies, delivering speeches in Marathi, while everyone else on the dais associated with the AIMIM talks in Hindi.
Borse says the depositors have organised themselves into multiple WhatsApp and Telegram groups where each of them post about how they are convincing their friends and neighbours to vote for Jaleel.
He, however, rushes to clarify that he is not a part of AIMIM. “I am not campaigning for AIMIM,” he says. “I am campaigning for Imtiaz Jaleel.”
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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