‘Ignore my beard and skull cap, I am for all minorities’

GUWAHATI: Nine years ago, Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi asked dismissively: “Who is Badruddin Ajmal?” Earlier this year, after his party AIUDF won half the seats it contested in a tribal council, Ajmal asked, “Now, who is Tarun Gogoi?”

That, precisely, is the length of AIDUF chief Ajmal’s journey so far, while Gogoi’s graph in Assam has been southbound since the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Of the 14 LS seats, the Congress managed three while the BJP bagged seven. More importantly, for a state polarised on religious, ethnic and linguistic lines, Ajmal emerged as Gogoi’s equal.

For the AIUDF, the youngest of Assam’s top five political parties, the rise has been phenomenal. From 10 seats in 2006 — six months after its birth — the party secured 18 in the 126-member assembly in 2011, leaving the once-potent regional Asom Gana Parishad (10) and BJP (five) behind.

Sixteen of AIUDF’S seats in the last assembly election were spread across nine districts where Muslims, mostly Bengali-speaking migrants, are in a majority.

But Ajmal, a scholar from Deoband in Uttar Pradesh and one of India’s richest politicians, who made his millions from the family business of perfumes, insists his is not a Muslim-only party, though it was formed “because the Congress betrayed the minorities” in Assam.

Doing everything large-scale is perhaps an Ajmal trait. The family owns most of Hojai, a town of 36,000 people in central Assam’s Nagaon district. It also runs the largest agar plantation near Hojai, Asia’s richest NGO named Markaj-ul Maaris and Asia’s largest rural charitable hospital — the 500-bed Haji Abdul Majid Memorial Hospital & Research Centre — besides one of the world’s biggest perfume businesses.

But Ajmal draws a distinction between the AIUDF and parties like the Hyderbad-based All India Majlise-ittehadul Muslimeen of Asaduddin Owaisi. “We have non-muslim MLAS and our working president is a tribal. People go by my appearance (beard, skull cap) to pass judgement, but few parties are as broad-based and secular as ours.” The AIUDF working president Aditya Langthasa is a senior doctor in Ajmal’s HAMM Hospital.

The ‘all-embracing approach’, apart from an increasing hold on Muslims, who account for 40%-80% of the population in 35 assembly seats, has made the competition wary of the AIUDF. Even tribe-specific parties such as the Bodoland People’s Front — ideologically opposed to the AIUDF — are not averse to a strategic alliance with it.