AIMIM spokesperson Asim Waqar joins Congress ahead of UP polls

AIMIM national spokesperson Syed Asim Waqar joined the Congress on Wednesday and accused his former party of working as the BJP's "B team" in Uttar Pradesh. The induction took place at the All India Congress Committee office at 24 Akbar Road, in the presence of AICC Uttar Pradesh in-charge Rajendra Pal Gautam, state president Ajay Rai and minority department chairman Imran Pratapgarhi.

Waqar, a Lucknow resident who became a familiar television face as AIMIM's national spokesperson, had been with Asaduddin Owaisi's party since 2017 after two decades in the Samajwadi Party. Congress sources said Pratapgarhi handled the crossing. Neither Owaisi nor any senior AIMIM functionary had commented by late afternoon.

Waqar's charge was specific. "On the ground, we don't fight the BJP; we fight the Congress, the Samajwadi Party; we are fighting every other person who wants to remove the BJP," he said. He added that AIMIM pays "lip service" to removing the ruling party while contesting the parties that actually take it on. "In reality if someone is fighting the BJP across the country it is Congress, Rahul Gandhi and his team."

Uttar Pradesh votes early next year. AIMIM has been trying to build a Muslim vote bank outside Hyderabad. Congress won two of the 399 seats it contested in 2022. The Samajwadi Party remains the larger opposition force in the state. Waqar's move is a personnel loss for Owaisi more than a transfer of organisation. He was a daily presence on Hindi news television and a known voice in Lucknow's political circuit.

Waqar also revived an older allegation against West Bengal leader Humayun Kabir, saying he had accused Kabir of being a BJP agent and that a sting had spoken of Rs 1,100 crore. He said a future Congress government at the Centre should look at who provided the money. That claim sits outside the UP arithmetic and was not independently restated by Congress leaders at the briefing.

The crossing fits a pattern Congress has used before: take a recognisable minority-community spokesperson from a smaller party and put him on the national stage as proof of outreach. Whether it moves votes in 2027 depends on booth work that Waqar does not control. What it does immediately is force AIMIM to explain why its UP campaign keeps losing public faces to the very parties it says it is not splitting.

Owaisi has long argued that Congress and the Samajwadi Party take Muslim votes for granted. Waqar flipped that argument. He said the smaller party spends its energy cutting into those two rather than into the BJP. That is an old charge in Indian opposition politics. It lands harder when it comes from the person who used to make AIMIM's case on prime time.

Congress will now test whether Waqar can bring workers and donors with him, or whether the story ends as a one-day television event. AIMIM's silence on Wednesday left that question open.