Speaking in the city on Saturday, Asaduddin Owaisi said it didn’t look like a Hyderabad election anymore.
Hyderabad:
Taking a dig at the BJP for deploying its biggest leaders for a mere municipal election in Hyderabad, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi has said the only person left to campaign in the city was US President Donald Trump.
Addressing a public rally at Hyderabad’s Langer House on Saturday, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) leader said it didn’t look like a Hyderabad election anymore, given the kind of leaders campaigning for the BJP.
“It is as if we are electing a Prime Minister in place of Narendra Modi. I was at a rally in Karwan and said that everyone has been called here. A child said they should have called Trump too. He was right, only Trump is left,” Mr Owaisi said, according to an ANI report.
The BJP has been parading all its top guns, from party national JP Nadda to Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath, to campaign for the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation Election scheduled for December 1. Even Union Home Minister Amit Shah is scheduled to attend various poll-related programmes in the city today.
Last Thursday, Mr Owaisi even challenged Prime Minister Modi to campaign for the elections to see how many seats his party, the BJP, wins.
The campaign has also turned quite vitriolic in the past few weeks, with the city police even having to intervene and warn politicians against communally sensitive speeches.
For instance, BJP state President, Bandi Sanjay, recently threatened a “surgical strike to flush out Rohingya and Pakistanis” in Hyderabad. Bengaluru South MP, Tejaswi Surya, called his Hyderabad counterpart, Asaduddin Owaisi, a “modern Mohammed Ali Jinnah”. These utterances have been roundly denounced by the TRS, the Congress, and Mr Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen.
On his part, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao has appealed to Hyderabad’s voters to keep “divisive forces” away and choose “progressive parties”.