The myth of Owaisi’s polarisation The option of letting a Muslim represent Muslims and giving Asadduddin Owaisi a seat at the Mahagathbandhan table does not seem to have occurred to anyone. Updated: December 22, 2020 10:14:17 pm AIMIM's president Asaduddin Owaisi. (File) Written by Nizam Pasha There has been much disquiet in the “liberal” circles over Asadduddin Owaisi’s rise in national politics as the face of India’s Muslims. There is great indignation over how he is cutting the Congress-Mahagathbandhan vote share and directly benefitting the Sangh Parivar. Writing about the Congress’s landslide victory in the 1937 provincial elections in Bihar, Maulana Azad in his book India Wins Freedom wrote that the general secretary of the AICC, Syed Mehmud, was the natural candidate for the position of chief minister of the first autonomous provincial government in Bihar. But voices within the Congress, led by Rajendra Prasad, felt that a Muslim chief minister would alienate the majority and so Krishna Sinha was called from the Upper House of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi and groomed for chief ministership: “One has to admit with regret that the nationalism of the Congress had not then reached a stage where it could ignore communal considerations and select leaders based on merit without regard to majority and minority.” This extract was part of the portions that Maulana Azad had left out of the original text of his book and willed that they be released 30 years after his death, as he felt India was not yet ready for it when he was writing. Azad died in 1958, and these portions were released in a revised edition only after a court order in 1988. Maulana Azad, however, made a gross error of judgement in his assessment. India would still not be ready for this insight 30 years after his death.