Restive Owaisis- Re-visiting Qasim Rizvi? : Ramashre Upadhyay

Restive Owaisis- Re-visiting Qasim Rizvi?
                             Dated 01-Jan-2015

By R. Upadhyay

All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen President and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi while speaking after releasing a book “Mere Taboot Par Jashna”(Celebration on my Coffin) in last September (2014) at Hyderabad criticised the demand of the local unit of the BJP and other parties to celebrate September 17 officially as “Hyderabad Liberation Day”. He demanded the State Government to include a chapter on seventh Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan in the school syllabus of Telangna State. (http://www.siasat.com/english/news/asaduddin-owaisi-demands-chapter-niza…).

Owaisi clan of Hyderabad is known for their controversial statements from the day they inherited the legacy and succession of Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) in 1957 by prefixing All India in it. Thus, the AIMIM emerged as the re-incarnation of the dreaded, divisive communal and violent MIM. Unfortunately, its leaders too remained perpetually restive and aggressive against the constitutional establishment of the country to keep the legacy of Nizam and Qasim Rizvi, a militant Islamist in his (Nizam) army.

Rizvi who was the president of MIM, a historically divisive and disruptive political formation had a black record of setting up the infamous, communal and violent Islamic militia known as Razakars as a para-military Islamic force under the patronage of Nizam to defend his sovereignty over Hyderabad State against the proposal for its merger with Indian Union.

With Razakars under his command, Rizvi was so powerful that he was virtually the proxy ruler in the streets of Hyderabad and Aurangabad where the Islamic militia committed a reign of terror.  His militant and hateful mind-set could be judged from the threat he gave to the Government of India during talks with V. P. Menon, the then Secretary in the Ministry of States in Delhi. He said, “if Government of India insisted on a plebiscite, the final arbiter could only be the sword”. (Integration of the Indian States by V. P. Menon, page334). Similarly in one of his jehadi speeches as published in press, he asserted: “The day is not far off when the waves of the Bay of Bengal will be washing the feet of our sovereign”. He further declared that “he would plant the Asaf Jahi flag on the Red Fort in Delhi” (Ibid. page 352).

A later day  provocative public speech of Asaduddin’s brother Akbaraduddin Owaisi, the MLA of AIMIM in Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh that “Get the police out of the way for 15 minutes and we will show you who is more powerful” wass similar to the threat of Rizvi.

The political ideology of Razakar commander Rizvi as the president of the MIM which believed that “the ruler throne (Nizam) is the symbol of the political and cultural rights of the Muslim community …. (and) this status must continue forever”. (Party Politics in Andhra Pradesh by Vadakattu Hanumantha Rao, 1983, Page 163) appears to be the core ideology of the AIMIM leaders even now.

The MIM had also “proclaimed Muslims as the monarchs of Deccan with Nizam as only the symbolic expression of their political sovereignty. It demanded the creation of an independent Hyderabad to synchronise with the lapse of British paramountcy”. (State Government and Politics – Andhra Pradesh by Reddy & Sharma, 1979, page392).

Demanding an inclusion of a chapter on Nizam in school syllabus of Telangna by Asaduddin Owaisi as president of AIMIM is apparently a repeat of the above belief of the parent body MIM. A brief historical background of the AIMIM may be necessary to understand the political game of the Owaisi brothers.