AIMIM defeats BJP to win Telangana MLC seat

In a direct contest, AIMIM candidate Mirza Riyaz Ul Hassan Effendi defeated Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) nominee N. Gautham Rao by 38 votes.

Effendi polled 63 votes while Gautam Rao secured only 25 votes, officials said.

The victory is significant for AIMIM ahead of the elections to the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) due early next year.

AIMIM has been ruling the municipal body or playing the role of kingmaker for more than four decades.

Out of 112 voters, 88 had cast their votes in the MLC election held on April 23. The voters comprised corporators, MPs, MLAs and MLCs from the Hyderabad district.

The counting of votes was taken up from 8 a.m. on Friday at GHMC headquarters.

With 49 votes, the AIMIM was in a strong position to win the seat and with the support of the Congress party, which has 14 votes, the victory of its candidate appeared only a formality.

Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), which had 20 voters, abstained from polling.

The voters included 81 corporators and 31 ex-officio members (9 MPs, 15 MLAs and seven MLAs). The AIMIM has 40 corporators and nine ex-officio members (seven MLAs, one MLC, one Lok Sabha MP).

AIMIM president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi, his brother and party floor leader in Telangana Assembly, Akbaruddin Owaisi and all other voters cast their votes.

This is the second term for Effendi as MLC. His six-year term had come to an end last month, along with the term of four other MLCs. In the elections held from MLAs quota, Congress had bagged three seats while its ally Communist Party of India (CPI), had secured one seat. The fifth seat was won by BRS. All the candidates were elected unopposed.

Though AIMIM was keen to field a candidate from MLAs’ quota, the Congress party persuaded it to wait for MLC election from the Hyderabad local authorities’ constituency and promised its support.

With this win, the AIMIM’s tally in the 40-member Legislative Council has again gone up to two.

Meanwhile, BJP’s Gautam Rao alleged that Congress and BRS helped AIMIM win the election. He stated that the BJP may have lost the election in terms of numbers, but the party has achieved a moral victory.

Gautam Rao alleged that BRS helped the AIMIM by staying away from the election.