Hyderabad-based Muslim-oriented political party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen has lost deposits in 99 of the 100 seats it contested in the assembly elections of Uttar Pradesh. Though it has gathered some more votes as compared to what it could in 2017, the party led by Asaduddin Owaisi has miserably failed to deliver in a manner it pretended to do especially in the Muslim majority areas, and has not won a single seat in the state.
It is notable that, AIMIM had fielded most of its candidates in the constituencies which have a significantly higher percentage of Muslim population and voters. Even in the last assembly elections, when AIMIM had fielded 38 candidates from such Muslim-dominated constituencies, almost all of its candidates had lost their deposits.
Similarly, in the 2022 assembly elections, AIMIM candidates from almost all the contested seats have lost their deposits. However, while speaking with Times Now, the party spokesperson Waris Pathan has said that the party is growing in Uttar Pradesh.
The only candidate to have saved the deposit is Shah Alam alias Guddu Jamali from the Mubarakpur constituency. He was earlier in Bahujan Samaj Party. After leaving the BSP he first approached Samajwadi Party where he was denied a ticket. Then he came to AIMIM and contested the assembly election from the Mubarakpur seat from the AIMIM party. He has got slightly above 24% of the total votes according to the latest updates on the official website of the ECI.
Among major Muslim-dominated seats, Deoband was one of the most important assembly constituencies. Deoband is home to Darul Uloom Deoband which is the Islamic Seminary of Deobandi sect of the Sunni Islamic cult. AIMIM had given a ticket to Maulana Umair Madani who could get only 3501 votes in the land of one of the biggest schools of Islamic doctrine. It is notable that it is the Deobandi version of Sunni Islam that is followed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. BJP candidate Brijesh Singh has won from Deoband.
Interestingly, on the Varanasi North assembly seat, AIMIM had given a ticket to Harish Mishra, the surprising non-Muslim candidate by AIMIM in this election. This move of social engineering in Varanasi by AIMIM was seen as equivalent to its alliance in Maharashtra with Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi of Prakash Ambedkar in the 2019 general elections. In those elections, all the Dalit candidates of VBA had contested on the election symbol of AIMIM.
Talking about the vote percentage and the actual number of votes in favor of the AIMIM, it is a marginally better performance as compared to that in the assembly elections of 2017. In 2017, the AIMIM party had fielded 38 candidates and they collectively secured around 2 lakh votes. This time the 100 candidates of the party have secured more than 22 lakh votes which is quite a growth in the number of votes if not the percent vote share. In 2017, AIMIM had 0.2 percent votes in Uttar Pradesh while in 2022, it got 0.4 percent votes.
