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Journalism of Courage
He is the most well-known face of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) after the Owaisi brothers and has been known to push the envelope and enter unchartered political terrain in his eight-year career political career.
But, on Friday, the AIMIM’s Aurangabad MP Imtiaz Jaleel pushed the envelope too far when he said that if BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma, who has been suspended by the party, had to be “hanged” for her derogatory remarks about the Prophet it should be done from “this very square” in the city.
Jaleel’s outburst was a marked departure from the measured words he was known to use while reporting from Maharashtra during his career in broadcast journalism. In 2014, he quit journalism and took the plunge into politics when the AIMIM was looking to expand in Aurangabad. Five years later, a livid Jaleel contemplated quitting the Owaisi-led party, and contesting as an independent, after the party leadership frowned upon his decision to contest the Lok Sabha election. However, it did not come to pass and the political firebrand helped the AIMIM win its second Lok Sabha seat, far from its power base of Hyderabad.
But what made him leave his job at news channel NDTV and join politics? In an interaction with The Indian Express in 2014 in his house in Aurangabad, Jaleel said he evaluated what he was doing with his life during a rickety four-hour drive from Bhagwangad in Beed district to Pune after covering a Pankaja Munde rally. He was 46 years old at the time.
“After looking at old women sitting in the sweltering heat of Bhagwangad, waiting for a politician to make an appearance, the inanity of what I was doing hit me. I needed to reevaluate my life and decided to quit my job during my drive back to Pune,” he said.
While his family and friends were concerned about his future, Jaleel did not have to remain jobless for long as the AIMIM offered him a seat to contest the Assembly elections from the Muslim-dominated locality of Aurangabad Central.
“The AIMIM, which was looking to expand into Aurangabad, had sent a team to identify potential candidates. The party that was looking to project a young, educated Muslim face had identified a number of probable candidates. It was actually keen on nominating Imtiaz’s elder brother who declined. Imtiaz’s relation with the Asaduddin Owaisi in his capacity as a journalist then made Owaisi offer him that seat,” said a source.
Jaleel’s stint as a television reporter and the respect commanded by his family — his father was a surgeon — ensured a comfortable victory by over 20,000 votes. Soon after, the former journalist played an instrumental role in ensuring AIMIM’s emergence as the main Opposition party in the Aurangabad Municipal Corporation by winning 25 seats.
The AIMIM leader, who shares an amicable relationship with most politicians because of his previous career, is vocal about his adoration of party president Asaduddin Owaisi. “As a journalist, I had a chance to visit a charitable hospital that is run by Asaduddin Owaisi in Hyderabad. We were walking by when Asad bhai saw a man in military fatigues standing in the queue. He walked to the jawan and directed the doctors to attend to him first. The jawan said that he was getting his son treated in the hospital and thanked him for building the hospital. As we took the man’s leave, the jawan saluted Asad bhai. In spite of all the brickbats that the AIMIM gets, it is a party that stands for the poor and the downtrodden. I cannot visualise myself with any other party,” Jaleel told The Indian Express during the interaction in 2014.
In 2017, Jaleel was part of a controversy over his protest against the presence of writer Taslima Nasreen in Aurangabad. The year before, when fellow AIMIM MLA Waris Pathan was suspended from the Assembly for refusing to say Vande Mataram at the start of state Assembly proceedings, Jaleel was also part of the protest. But he escaped being censured.
In an ambitious move, Jaleel decided to contest the Lok Sabha election from Aurangabad, which, at the time, had elected a Muslim MP only once in 1980. The move created a major difference of opinion between Jaleel and the party leadership. The AIMIM had then tied up with Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) in an attempt to consolidate Dalit and Muslim votes in the state. Ambedkar unilaterally announced former High Court Judge B G Kolse Patil as the VBA candidate from Aurangabad for the parliamentary election. With Ambedkar unwilling to retract Kolse Patil’s nomination and Owaisi not pushing for Jaleel’s candidature, sources said the former journalist had made up his mind to contest as an independent. Knowing that Jaleel’s exit would be a setback for the party, Owaisi managed to convince Ambedkar to put his weight behind Jaleel. In a tough battle with the Shiv Sena’s Chandrakant Khaire, the AIMIM leader won by a narrow margin of 4,492 votes.
While Jaleel is a visible and media-friendly face of the party in Maharashtra, the AIMIM has not had desired electoral results in other major cities in Maharashtra. In 2019, the party also failed to retain Aurangabad Central, losing to the Shiv Sena, and also failed to increase its seat tally of two MLAs.
On Saturday, after Owaisi distanced himself from Jaleel’s remarks and said “Nupur Sharma must be arrested as per the law of our country”, the Aurangabad MP also clarified his remarks and said, “We are not a banana republic. As a lawmaker, I know that it is reprehensible to hang people on the streets. My intent was to state that there should be some stringent action against her … I was only espousing that there should be a law against those who hurt religious feelings.”
