Owaisi Puts a UP Alliance Clock in Akhilesh’s Path

AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi gave opposition parties until October 2 to join him against a third BJP term in Uttar Pradesh. Congress MP Imran Masood answered on September 21, saying Owaisi might win 4-5 seats and still help the BJP form the government, hours after Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav set a target of 27,000 extra votes in every assembly seat.

The quarrel is being staged as Congress versus AIMIM. The seat map both men are talking about belongs to Yadav.

Owaisi Sets an October 2 Alliance Clock

On Sunday in Kanpur’s Cantonment, Owaisi told a public meeting that his party does not want a BJP government for a third term in Uttar Pradesh and that parties who share that aim should join hands with AIMIM. He said they could together stop “Baba” from becoming chief minister again, using the nickname he applies to Yogi Adityanath.

We will wait until October 2, and then, whoever we form an alliance with, we will announce it on that very day and contest the UP elections alongside them.

Asaduddin Owaisi, AIMIM president, Kanpur public meeting

He warned parties not to read a restrained offer as weakness, and he pointed back to Bihar, where AIMIM asked for six seats, was turned away, and then faced what he called false allegations. He also said no single party can stop the BJP on its own.

The date sits on a campaign that AIMIM has already begun. The party opened its 2027 effort in June from Matera in Bahraich and has held meetings in Najibabad, Saharanpur, Moradabad and Kanpur, with more stops listed for Shravasti and Azamgarh. Party workers have talked of building a network across about 200 assembly seats, a planning figure rather than a final candidate list, with the heaviest work in Saharanpur, Moradabad, Bijnor, Muzaffarnagar, Rampur and Amroha.

Owaisi told reporters he was in the state for election work and hoped AIMIM candidates would this time enter the Uttar Pradesh assembly. He said a large community had been left without its own political leadership, and he kept the door open to “like-minded” groups while refusing to name them before October 2.

The Warning Comes From Saharanpur

Masood did not answer as a Delhi commentator. He is the Congress MP from Saharanpur, the western Uttar Pradesh district where AIMIM has been trying to turn a Muslim-heavy electorate into its own booth network. In 2022 the BJP won 5 of the district’s 7 assembly seats. Congress still took the Lok Sabha seat in 2024.

SAHARANPUR IN TWO ELECTIONS

• Assembly 2022: Samajwadi Party’s Ashu Malik won the Saharanpur seat with 1,07,007 votes, 30,745 ahead of the BJP, while AIMIM’s Margoob polled 8,187 votes (3.15 per cent) and Congress polled 1,217.
• Lok Sabha 2024: Masood won the Saharanpur parliamentary result in 2024 with 5,47,967 votes (44.74 per cent), 64,542 ahead of the BJP’s Raghav Lakhanpal, who took 4,83,425.
• Booth leftover: The Bahujan Samaj Party still polled 62,637 votes in that 2022 assembly contest, many times AIMIM’s local pile, which is why Masood’s warning is about margins, not a new majority.

Masood said defeating the BJP was the primary aim and that Muslims alone cannot do it. If the BJP wins, he said, Muslims suffer the consequences. Hyderabad’s climate, he added, is not Uttar Pradesh’s.

“Owaisi Ji might win 4-5 seats, but he ends up facilitating a BJP government. What will you do with those five MLAs?” he said. He argued that an alliance should be locked at once, that the Congress was essential to any fight against the BJP, and that delay does damage on the ground. He also said he did not know who, if anyone, was already in talks.

The pitch Masood is answering did not begin on Sunday. In July, speaking in Saharanpur, Owaisi said he was ready to form an alliance to stop the BJP’s return, that joining hands was not weakness, and that parties should not cry after the results if they denied the offer. The Monday warning is a reply to a line already laid down in Masood’s own city.

Why Akhilesh Yadav Is the Silent Third Party

Congress is talking as if it is the centre of the opposition. The last assembly result says otherwise. The Election Commission’s 2022 Uttar Pradesh statistical files give the Congress 2 seats out of 403 and 2.33 per cent of the statewide vote, on 21,51,234 ballots, after contesting 399 seats. The Samajwadi Party won 111 seats and 32.06 per cent. The BJP won 255 seats and 41.29 per cent.

Masood still said a fight against the BJP can only be waged with the Congress, and that Rahul Gandhi’s leadership could overcome them. That is a national claim. In Lucknow it collides with a simple fact: the only opposition party that can form a government in Uttar Pradesh, on present numbers, is Yadav’s.

Owaisi named that fact in Kanpur. He asked how many riots took place “when your Akhilesh bhaiya was in power,” cited the 2013 Muzaffarnagar violence, and said about 50,000 people were displaced. He also said successive state governments, BJP and Samajwadi, had failed Muslims on schools and work, and he questioned Muslim representation during the Samajwadi years.

That is not a courtesy call to Congress. It is a public squeeze on the party that actually holds the Muslim-Yadav arithmetic. Masood’s demand to “finalise it immediately” is, in practice, a demand that Yadav decide whether AIMIM is a partner, a spoiler, or a problem to be boxed into a few seats. Yadav has not answered the Kanpur invitation in public.

AIMIM’s 4,50,929 Votes Landed in Tight Races

The 2022 count is the hard floor under Masood’s 4-5 seat forecast. AIMIM contested 95 seats, won none, and forfeited deposits on all 95. It polled 4,50,929 votes, 0.49 per cent of the state and 2.01 per cent in the seats it fought. A viral claim that the party gifted the BJP 165 seats was false: AIMIM was not even on the ballot in most of the house, and only 29 seats in the state were won by under 2,000 votes, 18 of them by the BJP and its then allies.

THE 2022 ASSEMBLY TALLY

Those figures, from the party-wise 2022 assembly tally and the statistical files, do not make AIMIM a third pole. They do put its local piles inside a few photo finishes, which is the part Masood is using.

SEVEN SEATS WHERE AIMIM SAT INSIDE THE GAP

• Moradabad Nagar: BJP’s Ritesh Kumar Gupta won 1,48,384 to the Samajwadi Party’s 1,47,602, a gap of 782, while AIMIM’s Waqi Rasheed took 2,661.
• Nakur: BJP’s Mukesh Choudhary won 1,04,114 to 1,03,799, a gap of 315, while AIMIM’s Rizwana took 3,593 (1.33 per cent); the BSP’s 55,112 votes were the much larger split.
• The rest of the seven: Bijnor, Sultanpur, Kursi, Aurai and Shahganj complete the list on which a seat-by-seat reading put AIMIM inside the Samajwadi-BJP gap.

On those two named seats, AIMIM’s vote was larger than the winning margin. That is the mechanism Masood is describing, and it is also smaller than the story often told about it. The same reading put Mayawati’s BSP inside the gap on 27 seats, and even a full transfer of those 27 plus AIMIM’s 7 plus four Congress-split seats would not have taken the house off the BJP alliance. AIMIM’s threat in 2027 is local, in western Uttar Pradesh and Rohilkhand, not statewide.

Bihar Already Ran This Six-Seat Bargain

Owaisi is not guessing at this sequence. He is repeating it. In Bihar in 2020, AIMIM won five Seemanchal seats. Four of those MLAs later joined the Rashtriya Janata Dal, leaving Akhtarul Iman as the party’s lone legislator. Before the 2025 Bihar election, Iman wrote to Lalu Prasad Yadav and Tejashwi Yadav offering to take six seats and asking for a Seemanchal development board rather than a ministry. The letters went unanswered. Tejashwi’s camp would not cede a Muslim-heavy bloc to a party fishing in the same pond.

THE ROAD TO OCTOBER 2

1. June 2026: AIMIM launches its Uttar Pradesh campaign from Matera in Bahraich and begins a western UP and Rohilkhand meeting circuit.
2. July 2026: Owaisi, in Saharanpur, says joining hands is not weakness and tells other parties not to cry after the results if they deny an alliance.
3. September 20, 2026: In Kanpur he names October 2 as the alliance date; in Lucknow, Yadav tells his state executive to add 27,000 votes on every seat.
4. September 21, 2026: Masood warns that 4-5 AIMIM MLAs would still leave a BJP government in place.
5. October 2, 2026: AIMIM is due to name partners, or to confirm it will walk into 2027 on its own.

In 2025 AIMIM contested 28 Bihar seats and again won five, reclaiming Amour, Kochadhaman, Bahadurganj, Jokihat and Baisi. Post-poll seat readings said the Grand Alliance lost a cluster of Seemanchal races in which AIMIM’s vote exceeded the winning margin. Owaisi now tells Uttar Pradesh the same story he told Patna: talk to us, or do not complain when the votes do not add up.

A 27,000-Vote Target Leaves Little Slack

Yadav’s Sunday instruction to the Samajwadi state executive was specific. The party, he said, will work to raise its count by 27,000 in every assembly seat in 2027, which he also described as cutting 27,000 BJP votes. Cadres would use technology, go house to house, and talk about justice and dignity, he said, including with families who say they have faced injustice.

Twenty-seven thousand votes is a different scale from AIMIM’s 8,187 in Saharanpur or 2,661 in Moradabad Nagar. It is also the kind of cushion that disappears if a third Muslim-facing party peels a few thousand ballots off the Samajwadi column in a west UP photo finish. Masood’s 4-5 seat line and Yadav’s 27,000-vote line are aimed at the same handful of constituencies. They just refuse to say so to each other.

Masood mixed in a second complaint, about Special Intensive Revision notices landing on MPs, former chief ministers and even the external affairs minister, and asked how an ordinary person is meant to chase documents. That fight is running on a separate track. It does not settle who gets the Muslim-heavy seats on the 2027 list.

October 2 is now the date Owaisi has put on other people’s calendars. Yadav, who has the seats, the 27,000-vote machine, and the silence, is still the person who has to decide whether AIMIM is invited in or left to hunt those 4,50,929 votes again.