AIMIM Pulled Off Bihar Stunner In 2020, Repeats It This Year

As the NDA juggernaut rolled over the opposition in Bihar on Friday, one party that managed to acquit itself well was Asaduddin Owaisi's AIMIM.

The party had pulled off a stunner in the 2020 Bihar Assembly elections, winning five seats, all of them in the Seemanchal region of the state. And it repeated the feat this time as well.

Comprising four districts - Araria, Katihar, Kishanganj and Purnea - Seemanchal has 24 Assembly seats and a large portion of the state's Muslim population. The AIMIM was, thus, pinning its hopes on this region to stay relevant in the state, and it delivered.

The party has won the same five constituencies - Kochadhaman and Bahadurganj in Kishanganj district, Amour and Baisi in Purnea, Jokihat in Araria - proving that its 2020 result was not a one-off.

What makes the AIMIM's performance even more spectacular is that four of its MLAs had defected to the RJD after the 2020 elections, and only the winner from Amour, Akhtarul Iman, had remained with the party. Iman won the seat again this time.

The AIMIM was also forced to go it alone after its attempts to tie up with the Mahagathbandhan failed, and it pointed this out to the opposition alliance on Friday, after the trends became clear.

"In the beginning, we had gone to them and offered to contest together. But they were too arrogant," senior party leader Waris Pathan said.

"The RJD and the Congress are themselves responsible for the division of minority votes. We asked them to contest together and sought only six seats from the Mahagathbandhan, but they refused," he added.

In 2020, the NDA had won 12 seats from Seemanchal and the Mahagathbandhan (MGB) seven, and the region also went largely the way the rest of Bihar did in this election. The NDA is leading in, or has won, 14 constituencies while the MGB's figure is only five.