All India Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) president and MP Asaduddin Owaisi on Sunday asserted that no one can touch the Indian Constitution as it is sacrosanct and the Supreme Court has already declared that the basic tenets cannot be changed.
“I am totally against the talk to change the Indian Constitution. Even the Vajpayee government, which had set up a Constitution review committee could not do anything. Prime Minister Narendra Modi or Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao also cannot do anything,” he affirmed, when asked why he has been quiet when KCR had openly pitched for a new Constitution..
Mr. Owaisi was speaking at the ‘Manthan Samvaad’, the annual flagship event organised by the public discourse forum, where he declared that he was open to any “uncomfortable” questions. He was quite combative when was asked about being called the ‘B’ team of BJP. “I am the ‘A’ team of the BJP! When Aam Admi Party (AAP) decides to fight the Gujarat Assembly elections, why is it not called the ‘B’ team of BJP? It is just because Kejriwal is a Hindu and I am a Muslim?” he countered.
The MIM party had contested just three Lok Sabha seats, one each in Bihar and Maharashtra apart from Hyderabad last time and had contested 20 seats for the Bihar Legislative Assembly, of which it won five.
In the majority of 15 other constituencies, it has been either the Janata Dal (U) or Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) which had won. The RJD MPs refused to have any kind of alliance with the MIM before the polls and had also lured his own party MLAs later, explained Mr. Owaisi.
The Hyderabad MP also wondered how the “secular-liberal” lobby found a ‘hero’ in Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar although he has led two coalition governments with the BJP earlier and even Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has been praising RSS and Mr. Modi. While every Hindu caste is represented in Parliament, it is not the same for Muslims because no one wants to vote for a Muslim candidate, he claimed, and said he was against elected representatives shifting party loyalties as it meant cheating the electorate.
With regard to hate speech, he was sure the recent incidents are “just the beginning” and alleged that a “policy decision” was taken at the Central level to keep at it. “The Supreme Court has put some curbs on the prime time news anchors. I have asked my partymen not to counter hate speech with another one, but to file a criminal case and let the government act. I thank KCR for acting quickly or we could have had a major conflagration here,” he maintained.
Mr. Owaisi saw nothing wrong in girls wanting to attend classes in a ‘hijab’ and asked those opposing it to remove the veil from their minds. His hope is to keep fighting the present political dispensation which has been “systematically assaulting the Indian Constitution and the democratic wings” because this country has decided “not to be theocratic but secular and socialist” with every citizen having equal rights irrespective of caste, creed or religion.
Earlier, Mr. Owaisi in his speech on ‘Constitution and Parliament’ observed that it was everyone’s duty to protect and nurture the values enshrined the Indian Constitution though the current “strong executive” has been trampling on them brazenly besides taking decisions without any consultation or debate reducing Parliament to a “rubber stamp”.
