The recent Maharashtra municipal body elections have many lessons and takeaways but one significant and underlying current is the churn in Muslim electoral behaviour. For much of the post-Independence period, Muslims were treated as a dependable vote bank for the Congress and a wider “secular” ecosystem that promised protection but rarely ceded real power. Today, from Seemanchal in Bihar to Maharashtra’s municipal map, that compact is visibly fraying. Muslim voters are experimenting with options, primarily the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), and in doing so are forcing a long-delayed reckoning with what representation actually means.This shift is neither sudden nor irrational. It is rooted in accumulated political marginalisation, declining legislative presence, and a studied refusal by mainstream parties to speak vocally about Muslim vulnerability in an era of majoritarian consolidation. In that sense, the turn towards explicitly Muslim-centred formations marks an important rupture with the idea of Muslims as a captive vote. At the same time, it demands a measure of caution: the political narrative in which the AIMIM articulates Muslim grievance often mirrors the very identity politics it claims to resist, even as it wraps itself in the reassuring language of the constitution.From Aurangabad to SeemanchalThe AIMIM’s increase in support beyond its citadel of Hyderabad began in 2014, when it won two assembly seats in Maharashtra – Aurangabad Central and Byculla – both having a high Muslim voter concentration. This momentum was briefly interrupted in the 2019 assembly polls, when the party lost these two seats, however gained two new constituencies – Malegaon Central and Dhule. In the Lok Sabha elections as well, the AIMIM’s Imtiyaz Jaleel won from Aurangabad and for the first time in the party’s history it had an MP part from Hyderabad. In 2024, the AIMIM lost this seat and was seemingly written off. However, in the municipal elections held now, the AIMIM has remerged as the second largest political force in the city, just behind the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party has retained a sizeable, consolidated vote in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar and has since translated that presence into a string of wins in municipal wards, which may be modest in absolute numbers, but disproportionate in political meaning. Maharashtra has become fertile ground for the party’s expansion beyond Hyderabad and for Muslim voters to experiment with their choices. Alongside the AIMIM, the modest victories of newer Muslim-led outfits such as ISLAM (short for Indian Secular Largest Assembly of Maharashtra) – floated by former Congress MLA Shaikh Asif – in the Maharashtra municipal elections further underline this moment of experimentation rather than consolidation within Muslim electoral politics. In Malegaon, the party secured 35 of the 84 seats in the civic body, while its ally, the Samajwadi Party, won five. Also read: Muslims and the Politics of Belonging in Contemporary IndiaA similar pattern is visible in Bihar’s Seemanchal belt, a region dominated by Muslims, who have long been left out of progress and development by successive governments and parties. The AIMIM’s arrival cracked open what was long assumed to be safe “secular” terrain. In the 2020 Bihar assembly election, the AIMIM won five seats in this region. Four of those MLAs defected to the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in 2022, leaving Akhtarul Iman as the lone AIMIM legislator. Despite that fragmentation, the party recovered and retained these five seats in Seemanchal in the 2025 polls. This underlined persistent local support and showed a conviction in voters to back the party as both a vote in favour of experimenting with a new formation and also to punish a Congress-led ecosystem that treated them as arithmetic without voice. The AIMIM’s advances in Bihar and Maharashtra owe less to the portability of the Owaisi brand than to the party’s ability to recruit locally credible leaders in regions where mainstream secular politics has hollowed out Muslim representation. The message from both regions is consistent: Muslims are no longer voting only defensively with the aim to keep the BJP out but also aspirationally, in favour of candidates who centre their everyday anxieties. It is a clear rejection by Muslim voters of having to singularly bear the burden that has been imposed on them to save democracy or champion secularism in these communally charged times.Congress’s silence and the search for voiceThis shift and moment in India’s Muslim politics is a response to a churn in Indian politics that has been identified by political scientists. Scholars like Feyaad Allie have described the “representation trap” in which Indian Muslims find themselves: openly excluded by the BJP, and symbolically embraced but substantively sidelined by parties that depend on Muslim votes while avoiding Muslim issues. Further, Adnan Farooqui’s work on Muslim under-representation shows how, as legislative presence shrinks, mainstream parties have responded not with corrective action but with greater caution. Across India’s non-BJP parties, especially the Congress, there are fewer Muslim tickets distributed, more backroom assurances, and almost no public admission or confrontation with the institutionalised discrimination that shapes Muslim lives. For instance, in Bihar, the Congress restricted fielding Muslims from seats that were overwhelmingly dominated by the community and fewer than their proportion in the state’s population, calling for much introspection. The Congress sits at the centre of this paradox. For decades, its compact with Muslim voters rested on a familiar formula: diffuse secular signalling, sporadic gestures of minority outreach, and the implicit promise of protection from majoritarian violence. What it did not provide was a pipeline of Muslim leadership, secure tickets in winnable constituencies, or a robust defence of rights when those were systematically eroded. A clear case in point was in Telangana, where the Congress won in 2023, backed by the support of several Muslim voters, but it had dismal Muslim representation in the Assembly or in its Cabinet. Only in late 2025, was the cricketer-turned-politician Mohammed Azharuddin elected as an MLC and accommodated as a minister. This too was done with a political and electoral objective of securing a much needed by-election victory in Jubilee Hills. In such a landscape, AIMIM’s offer of visibility, assertion, and a leader who raises issues of mob lynching, bulldozer demolitions, and ghettos openly. This appears less like an aberration and more like an inevitability. The turn towards the party is, in many pockets, less an endorsement of its entire project and more an indictment of the Congress’s abdication.The Muslim BJP dilemmaYet to stop at this diagnosis is to miss the danger embedded in the remedy. The AIMIM repeatedly invokes the Constitution, civil liberties and the language of rights, and it has invested effort in projecting alliances with Dalit and backward-caste groups. But its core electoral strategy is unapologetically identity-driven. It mobilises voters primarily as Muslims under siege, rather than as citizens whose religious identity intersects with class, caste, occupation and region. In doing so, it reproduces the logic of the BJP’s politics, albeit for Muslims. This is not to suggest a crude moral equivalence. Muslims, unlike Hindus, live with structural vulnerability in today’s India: targeted violence, discriminatory policing, and a legislative onslaught that seeks to render their presence conditional. But at the level of political grammar, the symmetry is striking. The BJP constructs a Hindu “we” that must consolidate to keep an allegedly appeased minority in check; the AIMIM constructs a Muslim “we” that must consolidate to survive an emboldened majority. Both thrive on sharper communal boundaries. Both gain when voters retreat into homogenous blocs.It is in this sense that the description of the AIMIM as a “Muslim BJP” captures a real anxiety, even if it sits uneasily with the asymmetry of power. Identity politics framed as resistance can end up legitimising the very common-sense of bloc politics that sustains majoritarianism. A polity in which every community is encouraged to seek its “own” party is not a more plural polity; it is a more fragmented one. For Muslims, the risk is that representation secured on narrowly communal terms may deepen isolation at precisely the moment when coalition-building is most urgent.An opening, and a warning, for secular politicsThe present moment is therefore both empowering and perilous for Muslim voters. The willingness to withhold support from parties that take them for granted is a democratic instinct, not a deviation from it. It signals agency, exhaustion with tokenism, and a refusal to be endlessly lectured on strategic voting while living with unaddressed fear and precarity. But assertion through a permanently communal vehicle cannot, by itself, overcome marginalisation in a system where every important law, budget and commission still rests on cross-community coalitions. The heavier responsibility lies with the Congress and the broader secular opposition. If they wish to remain relevant to India’s largest minority, they will have to move beyond the politics of managing backlash. That means fielding Muslim candidates in genuinely winnable seats, investing in Muslim organisational leadership, and speaking clearly about discrimination, housing segregation, police violence and legal disenfranchisement without outsourcing this vocabulary to smaller parties. It also means situating Muslim concerns within a wider struggle over constitutionalism and social justice, rather than treating them as an inconvenient sub-theme to be handled in closed-door meetings.Ahead lie tests in West Bengal and Kerala where AIMIM may participate in Bengal but sit it out in Kerala. Both states have sizeable Muslim populations which have long been taken for granted by the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Congress-Indian Union Muslim League’s (Congress-IUML’s) United Democratic Front (UDF). They could yet spawn new assertions or fragment votes if substantive representation continues to lag.Seen in this light, the rise of AIMIM reflects a community that is tired of being a silent pillar of ‘secularism’ while watching its rights erode. But it is also a warning and challenge. A politics that mirrors the BJP’s communally framed mobilisation, even in defensive form, cannot be the horizon of Muslim aspiration. The task ahead is to ensure that Muslim political assertion strengthens Indian democracy rather than mirrors the forces that have hollowed it out.Amaan Asim is an MPhil scholar at the University of Oxford and a political analyst and consultant.