New Delhi: The Asaduddin Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) has lost both constituencies it contested in the 2025 Delhi assembly elections, even though it helped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win the Mustafabad seat.
Tahir Hussain, AIMIM candidate from Mustafabad, has finished third behind Bharatiya Janata Party’s Mohan Singh Bisht, the incumbent Karawal Nagar MLA, and Aam Aadmi Party’s Adeel Ahmad Khan. Bisht secured the victory by a margin of 17,578 votes.
The other AIMIM candidate, Shifa-ur-Rehman Khan, contesting from the Okhla seat, has also finished third behind AAP’s Amanatullah Khan and BJP’s Manish Chaudhary. Khan won the seat by a gap of over 23,000 votes.
Okhla witnessed a four-way contest, with AAP fielding sitting MLA Amanatullah Khan and Congress nominating Ariba Khan, daughter of former party MLA from Okhla Asif Mohammad Khan. The BJP fielded Manish Chaudhary, a 2017 councillor from Vijay Vihar, who was in the third position with over 14,000 votes as of 2 pm.
Both AIMIM candidates Tahir Hussain and Shifa-ur-Rehman were in jail in connection with the 2020 Delhi riots, and were granted custody parole to campaign for the election.
Hussain, a former AAP councillor, was suspended by the party in 2020 after being accused in multiple cases related to the riots. The Supreme Court granted him custody parole last month for the election. During his campaign, he claimed to be a “victim of injustice” and strongly criticised the AAP.
BJP’s Mohan Singh Bisht is a five-time MLA, having won the Karawal Nagar legislative constituency four consecutive times from 1998 to 2013, and then again in 2020. AAP fielded Adeel Ahmad Khan, a journalist-turned-politician, while Congress fielded Ali Mehdi, son of former MLA Hasan Mehdi, who held the seat from 2008 to 2016.
Mustafabad was one of the worst-affected areas during the communal riots that broke out in the national capital in 2020.
The constituency was previously a Congress stronghold, with Hasan Mehdi winning two consecutive elections in 2008 and 2013. However, the tides turned in 2015 when the BJP’s Jagdish Pradhan won the seat—one of just three constituencies the party secured that year. In 2020, the AAP’s Haji Yunus claimed victory.
Rehman, former president of the Jamia Millia Islamia Alumni Association, is also an accused in a case linked to the Delhi riots. In prison since April 2020, he was granted a five-day custody parole by a Delhi court on 29 January to contest the polls.
Shaheen Bagh and Jamia Nagar, the epicentre of the anti-CAA protests, fall within the Okhla constituency. With a 52 percent Muslim population, the Muslim vote often becomes the decisive factor in the constituency.
Amanatullah Khan won both the 2015 and 2020 assembly elections from Okhla by significant margins. In 2015, he defeated the BJP’s Braham Singh by over 64,000 votes, and in 2020, he won by more than 70,000 votes. However, he was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) last year in the Delhi Waqf Board money laundering case but was granted bail two months later.
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)
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Owaisi’s misplaced ambitions have led to this. Many Muslims have voted for AIMIM – this division of votes has hurt the AAP. AAP tally could have been better, albeit marginally, if the AIMIM had campaigned for AAP rather than against it.
The INDI Alliance has veen reduced to a circus now – everyone is contesting against everyone else.