Beyond the Ballot: Waqar Usmani on the Unfinished Politics of Muslim Representation

Waqar Usmani has spent more than a decade inside India's campaign machinery. He spent six years with the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC), rising to state head of its Political Intelligence Unit during the 2021 West Bengal assembly election, and for the past four years he has run his own outfit, Othman Advisory, alongside associate director Moin Kazi. An alumnus of Aligarh Muslim University who was himself part of its student politics, Usmani has built a career reading how parties actually decide who gets a ticket, who gets sidelined, and who gets to define an entire community's political voice. In a long conversation on the Nous Podcast, he laid out both a working theory of how Indian political parties function day to day, and a pointed argument about how Muslim political identity in India has come to be defined largely from outside the community rather than from within it.

Parties Run on Controlled Chaos

Before turning to Muslim politics specifically, Usmani wanted to establish how parties work in general, because he believes the rest of the conversation only makes sense against that backdrop. A party's central command holds an ideological core, he said, but that ideology cannot “feed” the rank and file every day. What actually holds a party's foot soldiers in place is a constant, almost theatrical rhetoric that translates grand ideology into something a local worker can feel connected to. Ticket distribution and internal promotion, meanwhile, follow a pragmatic logic rather than a purely ideological or merit-based one: a party weighs how well a candidate aligns with a constituency's actual demography and how well they fit into existing local power structures. He described a common scenario in which a central leadership deliberately overrides an entrenched local strongman who has come to dominate a district, precisely to keep the internal balance of power fluid and every tier of the party auditioning for relevance.

This, Usmani argued, is not a flaw but the design. A party that eliminated internal conflict and ran itself like “a classroom with a complete code of conduct” would stop being a party. Contest and disorder are what keep it charged. “Controlled chaos should always remain in any party,” he said, adding that no successful party actively pursues a strategy that would leave it irrelevant or diluted.

Why “Random” Candidates Aren't Random

Asked how parties settle on candidates who look, from the outside, like implausible choices — a first-time politician such as cricketer Yusuf Pathan winning a Bengal Lok Sabha seat, or Yogi Adityanath's elevation to Uttar Pradesh chief minister — Usmani rejected the idea that these are surveyed decisions in any formal sense. Parties do not run paper surveys, he said; they run a “perception survey” through their own local leaders and block-level networks, gauging visibility and acceptability informally rather than empirically. Choosing a person is still, in his framing, a calculated gamble rather than a coin toss. “Election is a risk. Giving position to someone is a risk,” he said, and that logic applies as much to Narendra Modi's elevation as the party's prime ministerial face in 2014 as it does to a celebrity cricketer parachuted into a constituency he had never contested before.

Signals, Loyalty, and the Trust Problem Inside Parties

Usmani connected this pragmatism to how politicians communicate with each other. Much of what looks like public rhetoric — praising a rival's yatra, hinting that a colleague might defect — is actually “political signalling,” a way of testing the waters before an open move, of the kind now visible around a figure like Raghav Chadha. He tied this back to what he calls a party's “base perception”: for the BJP, that base perception is Hindutva, which he described bluntly: “Hindutva is a living reality.” That belief, transmitted consistently from national to district-level leadership, is what he credits with making the Congress's older mobilizational plank — and the minority vote that anchored it — increasingly irrelevant. Muslims, in his reading, kept participating electorally even as their bargaining power as a constituency collapsed.

The Yatra That Built a Man, Not (Yet) a Machine

Pressed on Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra, Usmani read it as a textbook example of the same perception game rather than as movement-building in the deeper sense he cares about. The walk dramatically raised Gandhi's individual visibility and personal acceptability — people watched how he shook hands, how humble or informal he appeared — and gave him a kind of political agency he had lacked. But Usmani was careful to separate that from organizational strength: a political party, he said, “is not individual-centric, it is organization-centric,” and he added that he remains genuinely unsure how much the yatra actually built the Congress's structure as opposed to Gandhi's own persona.

From Protest to Movement — and Why CAA-NRC Stalled

This distinction between a movement and a mere moment runs through his account of the CAA-NRC protests. “Without a movement, a political party cannot stand,” he said, but a movement itself requires “entry points” — spaces where people can hold public conversations and engage democracy on their own terms. In his reading, the CAA-NRC protests consciously tried to build exactly such entry points: organizers invoked Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Constitution, opened the platform to any speaker, and worked hard to keep the language as secular and inclusive as possible. Even so, he said, as the protests ran alongside the approaching Delhi elections the entire effort was recast in mainstream discourse as “communal” — proof, in his view, that entry points built this way remain hostage to how external political actors choose to frame them, and that the moment never crystallized into a durable movement or organizational structure.

A Rainbow, Not a Bloc

The core of Usmani's argument is that “Muslim political identity” should not be treated as a single, homogeneous category at all. He insists on breaking it apart geographically and culturally: a Telugu-speaking Muslim in Andhra Pradesh's Srikakulam district, he said, has entirely different caste engagements, local leadership relationships and daily political realities from a Muslim voter in Madurai or one in Siddharth Nagar, Uttar Pradesh. He calls this a “rainbow canvas” rather than a single bloc, and argues Muslim political energy should be redirected toward this diversity rather than toward a single national identity question.

His diagnosis of what has gone wrong is that this identity question is currently being set from outside the community — through geopolitics, through language about a “global ummah” — rather than through constituency-level bargaining of the kind OBC and Dalit groupings routinely conduct. “It should go back to constituency, it should go back to wards,” he said, arguing that Muslim voters in UP have, by his account, no working municipal framework, no civic bargaining mechanism, and largely no localized demands on record — even though, he added pointedly, “you are so choked you cannot talk about your municipal stuff.”

The AIMIM Test Case

Usmani used the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen as a concrete case study of an existing model built around identity politics, and his assessment was unsparing. “I don't think AIMIM is working that way,” he said, arguing that the party's gains and losses are both bound to its Muslim identity rather than to a coherent political strategy. He offered numbers to make the point: by his account, AIMIM contested roughly 36 to 37 seats in Uttar Pradesh's 2017 assembly election and lost its deposit in all but one; in 2022 it contested more than 90 seats there and again lost its deposit everywhere but one. He also argued the party has become inseparable from Asaduddin Owaisi personally — describing how Owaisi, whom “many people call qaid,” has effectively grown larger than the organization he leads, walking “far ahead of the party” rather than behind it. Usmani was careful to credit Owaisi as a serious, mature parliamentarian who raises issues from Assam, Bengal and UP alike, and to affirm the party's constitutional right to contest anywhere. But he located much of AIMIM's appeal in the community's own sense of being “cornered” politically rather than in a demonstrably effective plan — a psychology, he suggested, that a single party cannot substitute for the deeper reconfiguration he is calling for.

Bengal's Warning: Representation Without Spark

Drawing on his own years working West Bengal for I-PAC, Usmani offered a second cautionary case. Numerically, he said, Muslims are well represented within the Trinamool Congress's political structure — nameable, countable figures. But when he tried to assess political dynamism rather than headcount, he found it largely absent among younger and dynastic Muslim leaders within the party. He could readily name a prominent, widely recognized Kolkata-based Muslim leader — Firhad Hakim — but said that outside the city, in rural Muslim-majority pockets such as Malda and the two Dinajpur districts, he could not name a single similarly recognized local leader. His conclusion was that political representation is supposed to generate cultural capital and local leadership, “not the other way around” — and that where representation exists only as a headcount, that generative effect simply does not follow.

Campuses and Municipal Wards as Starting Points

Usmani was equally direct about student politics. He said that, to his knowledge, no genuinely popular electoral leadership has emerged from student union politics at Aligarh Muslim University or Jamia Millia Islamia in roughly three decades — contrasting this with JNU, which produced visible figures such as Kanhaiya Kumar, though he noted that even Kanhaiya never independently won a legislative seat. He rejected the idea that this stems from any structural incapacity in these universities, calling the argument “an escapist stand,” and insisted that with more than 30,000 students between the two institutions, campuses remain a natural nursery where political articulation should be actively cultivated rather than restricted.

On the electoral side, he pointed to municipal and ward-level elections as the most concrete near-term opening. “I believe it's a golden opportunity,” he said, describing local civic office as a space where Muslim citizens already possess the relevant knowledge — irrigation schedules, fertilizer supply, disputes among gram pradhans, the state of local health centres — because these are lived, local concerns that do not need to be imported from national or international debates.

A Different Route — Culture as Politics

Usmani offered a second model, distinct from electoral representation altogether: politics built through culture. He pointed to the expansion of LGBTQ+ rights in India as a case where change was driven substantially through film, music, literature and eventual judicial recognition rather than primarily through electoral mobilization. He set this alongside communities such as the Bohras and Parsis, who hold limited electoral representation in India but considerable cultural and economic capital, arguing this represents a genuinely different — not lesser — form of political participation. He was careful to frame this not as a consolation for marginalization but, in his words, as an invitation to build from a community's own uniqueness rather than from a posture of crisis.

The Business Behind the Campaign

Usmani closed on his own trade. Political consultancies exist, in his account, because leaders like Modi created a genuine operational necessity around 2014 — a campaign built heavily around one figure and a fast-moving information environment — rather than the reverse. “It was not that political agencies were working for him to win the election,” he said of that period; the necessity of managing his persona at scale is what produced the modern consulting industry now serving nearly every major party. But Usmani was blunt about the limits of the profession: consultancy work, in his view, should end with the election cycle itself. Extending an outside agency's relationship into governance or subsequent campaigns, he warned, breeds fatigue among the party's own rank and file, who are repeatedly asked to prove themselves to the same outside team. Among his own campaigns, he singled out I-PAC's 2021 “Didi Ke Bolo” effort in West Bengal, where he served as the party's state intelligence lead, as the most rewarding of his career so far.

Asked to leave listeners with two takeaways, Usmani offered a diagnosis and a disposition. Politics, he said, is inherently chaotic, and the task — for a party or a community alike — is to manage that uncertainty rather than eliminate it. And for the Muslim community specifically, he argued for approaching the rebuilding of political voice from a position of possibility rather than crisis: not asking what has been lost, but what can still be built, ward by ward, campus by campus, and constituency by constituency.