GUWAHATI: It will be a battle for survival for Assam’s most visible Muslim face nationally, Maulana Badruddin Ajmal, when Dhubri goes to parliamentary elections on May 7.
The 68-year-old, who is the three-time sitting MP and chief of All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), is facing a challenge from Rakibul Hussain, a former Congress minister. Zabed Islam of the Asom Gana Parishad is the NDA’s consensus candidate.
Dhubri is considered the heartland of Bengali-speaking migrant Muslims. It shares a border with Bangladesh. The outcome of the polls will decide not only the future of Ajmal but also his party.
Over the past few years, a section of AIUDF supporters migrated to other parties, disillusioned that he is allegedly running it as a business enterprise. Ajmal is a perfume baron with business interests in India and some Gulf countries.
The AIUDF also contested Nagaon and Karimganj, both Muslim-majority seats which went to polls on April 26. Critics say the party set up candidates in these seats primarily to aid the ruling BJP. The BJP and the Congress were the two main players in Nagaon and Karimganj.
The Congress is trying to send across a message that Ajmal is an “old tiger” and that the AIUDF is the “B Team” of the BJP. It is telling voters that they have to stop Ajmal first if they want to evict the BJP from power in the state.
But Ajmal has many advantages. He is rich and known widely as a philanthropist. A virtual messiah of the migrant Muslims, he has been at the forefront every time the community faced any hardships, including during the time when the 1951 National Register of Citizens or NRC was updated in the state.
He had comfortably won the past three elections in the absence of strong opponents. But Hussain is expected to give the AIUDF chief a run for his money this time around.
For Hussain, who holds sway in parts of central Assam, it is his maiden parliamentary election. Since decades, the Congress had been influential in Dhubri and the adjoining Goalpara and Barpeta districts. Then, it slowly lost the space to the AIUDF. If Hussain wins, it could well be the first step for the Congress towards regaining the lost ground.
“Badruddin Ajmal is an old tiger. He woos people through magical healing but it will not keep him in a good stead this election,” Hussain claimed.
But Ajmal dismissed the old tiger barb by saying that a tiger is a tiger, whether young or old. “I am young enough to marry again,” he said. He predicted that Hussain’s defeat is “100% certain”. “Nobody can defeat Ajmal in Dhubri. I will win by 5 to 6 lakh votes,” he said confidently.