Politics as engineered instability
Waqar Usmani spent much of a long conversation with Nous dismantling a comforting assumption: that a well-run political party looks like a well-run institution, with clear hierarchy and settled rules. Usmani, founder and head of the political consulting firm Othman Advisory, spent more than six years inside the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC), rising to state head of its political intelligence unit for the 2021 West Bengal assembly election, before building his own practice over the past four years alongside associate director Moin Kazi. His central claim is blunt: "Party ka jo thrill hai na, party ki working philosophy hai, conflict hai, chaos hai" — a party's whole working philosophy is conflict, is chaos. A party that imposed classroom-style discipline on itself, he argued, would stop being a functioning party at all.
What looks like disorder from outside, in Usmani's account, is what he calls "controlled chaos" — a permanent, low-grade contest for proximity to central leadership, for tickets, for turf, that a party manages without ever resolving, because resolving it would remove the incentive that keeps cadre and mid-level leaders engaged. He described district-level power struggles in which a party's central command will deliberately block a well-known local leader from contesting in a neighbouring assembly seat, not because the leader lacks merit, but because letting them expand would destabilise an existing local power balance that the party depends on. Elsewhere, the same command will elevate outsiders precisely to break up an entrenched local "mathadhish" — his word for a leader who has effectively become an untouchable local potentate.
The randomness that isn't random
Usmani used a string of examples to illustrate how unpredictable candidate selection can look from outside while still following an internal logic. He pointed to the Trinamool Congress fielding former international cricketer Yusuf Pathan — with no political background and no evident connection to Bengali politics — against a veteran Congress leader in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, and winning. Pathan's appeal, Usmani argued, rested on the residual celebrity of his years playing for Kolkata Knight Riders rather than on any conventional political apprenticeship. He offered the elevation of Yogi Adityanath to Uttar Pradesh chief minister as a similar shock to conventional expectation, and Narendra Modi's own elevation as the BJP's 2014 prime ministerial candidate, despite never having sat in the Lok Sabha, as the largest such example. None of these choices are truly random, in his account: parties are running a continuous, informal perception survey of who can consolidate a constituency's actual demography and power relations, rather than picking candidates on ideological loyalty or merit alone.
Beneath candidate selection, Usmani described a layer of "political signalling" that lets politicians test their own market value without ever saying so openly — his example was Aam Aadmi Party leader Raghav Chadha's period of public prominence around the 2017 Punjab election, engineered, in his reading, more by the party testing his usefulness than by any organic movement behind him. Public praise of a rival leader, cross-party appointments to the Rajya Sabha — he cited the Congress sending poet-politician Imran Pratapgarhi to the upper house from Maharashtra — and quiet defections all form part of the same signalling economy that keeps politicians and parties mutually assessing one another between elections.
The BJP's advantage is a belief, not a machine
Asked to explain the BJP's durability, Usmani resisted crediting organisational efficiency alone. What the BJP has, he argued, is a "base perception" that Congress and most rivals lack: a living ideological conviction — Hindutva — that every layer of leadership, from the national stage down to the district unit, can invoke with total consistency. Congress, by contrast, has no equivalent base perception it can renew on demand; its historic identity as the party of independence has faded as a mobilising claim. He credited Rahul Gandhi's 2022 Bharat Jodo Yatra with a genuine, if narrow, achievement — transforming Gandhi's personal political persona, making him visible in a register (unshaven, walking, greeting people for months on end) that had not been available to him before — while questioning whether the yatra did anything to strengthen the Congress party's organisational structure independent of Gandhi himself. A movement, he argued, can make a leader; it does not automatically make a party.
A protest that never became a movement
The conversation's most pointed application of that distinction concerned the 2019–20 anti-Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens protests. Usmani argued that the protests, for all their scale and visibility, never crossed the threshold from protest into movement, and that Muslim politics has yet to reckon with why. His account was structural rather than accusatory: organisers deliberately built the broadest possible secular coalition, invoking B. R. Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi and Maulana Azad, holding up the Constitution, inviting Sikh langars and left-wing speakers onto shared platforms — and even so, the protests were successfully branded "communal" by opponents, feeding directly into the polarised 2020 Delhi riots and the Delhi assembly election that followed. If even a deliberately universalist, constitutionally framed protest gets read as sectarian, Usmani suggested, the deeper problem is that Muslim political expression currently lacks a reliable "entry point" into Indian democratic life altogether — pointing to Sharjeel Imam's own acknowledged loss of control over a protest he had helped lead as evidence that even organisers recognised the movement had drifted from its original aims.
The case against treating Owaisi as the whole story
Usmani's most detailed case study was Asaduddin Owaisi's All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, which he treated respectfully but sceptically. He offered underappreciated data points: AIMIM contested around 36 or 37 seats in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly election and lost its deposit in nearly all of them; in 2022 it contested more than 90 seats in the state and lost its deposit everywhere except one constituency. His deeper structural critique was about the party's shape rather than its results: "Asad Sahab party se bade ban gaye" — Owaisi has become bigger than his own party — such that, in his estimate, most people who follow AIMIM's campaigns could not name the party's state president in any state where it contests, because the party is built around one recognisable face rather than a distributed cadre structure. He was careful to credit Owaisi's individual political skill — a mature parliamentarian, in his words, fluent on Hyderabad's issues as well as on Bengal, Assam and Uttar Pradesh — while arguing that the community's enthusiasm for AIMIM says more about how cornered Muslim political sensibility currently feels than about any fully worked-out plan on the party's part: "Hum toh cornered hain, toh kam se kam koi toh hai" — we're cornered, so at least there's someone.
Rebuilding from the ward up
Usmani's prescription ran directly against the instinct to look for a single national Muslim political vehicle. Muslim political identity, he argued, needs to be deliberately "broken down" rather than treated as a homogeneous bloc, because a single, geopolitically inflected vocabulary — invoking a global "ummah" or brotherhood — is simply the wrong register for democratic bargaining at the constituency level. He drew a comparison to how Other Backward Classes communities across Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, especially since the rise of Yogi Adityanath's government, have carved out local bargaining power not because a party arrived and declared them under-represented, but because those communities built their own local spaces for negotiation first. Muslim voters, he argued, have participated loyally in Indian elections for decades and should be credited for that — "we have always been very happy participating, voting" — but that participation has remained largely reactive and externally driven, prompted by fear of a specific national threat (he cited anxieties around a Uniform Civil Code) rather than by sustained, locally rooted engagement with municipal governance, ward-level issues, or civic development between elections. His test case was hypothetical but pointed: a Muslim voter in a constituency like Siddharth Nagar should be able to explain, independent of national headlines, why they are voting for a particular candidate on local, civic grounds — a capacity he said currently does not exist in most places.
Usmani rejected the idea that this is simply a matter of information deprivation. Voters in small rural Uttar Pradesh constituencies, he argued, already know exactly when canal water is due to arrive, when fertiliser will be distributed, which village council secretary is not doing his job, and how many meetings their sitting legislator has actually held — the same texture of granular civic knowledge, he said, that any community needs to bargain politically. The Muslim question, he argued, gets treated as an exception to this rule not because the community lacks information, but because geopolitical anxieties — he pointed, by way of example, to the intense and understandable emotional pull of recent conflicts in the Middle East — keep pulling attention toward register that has no purchase in a municipal ward. He also pushed back on the idea that this happens automatically for other communities: invoking Newton's first law, he argued that a body at rest stays at rest until an external force acts on it, and that every community he named — Rajputs, Bhumihars, Kurmis, Kories, Mahadalits, or the Prajapati community he returned to repeatedly as his working example — has that force in the form of specific individuals who took the initiative to convene conversations, define shared issues, and organise people locally. Nothing about Muslim political bargaining power being externally constrained by SIR anxieties or national headlines, he said, absolves the community of needing that same kind of internal initiative-taker.
He offered municipal elections specifically as underused terrain: ward-level urban local body elections, he argued, are "a golden opportunity" for Muslim civic participation that requires no reference to Iran, Iraq or any distant geopolitical anxiety at all — just the unglamorous work of contesting as a corporator and delivering visible civic change.
Where student politics fits
Usmani was equally direct about the campus politics that so often doubles as the entry point to Indian public life. He described student union elections as an "innate function" of any university — a structured venue in which politically mature young adults form and test their views the way they test their ideas in academic debate — and lamented that this space, once vibrant, has been steadily restricted across Indian campuses over the past decade. Even so, he was cautious about overstating its downstream electoral impact: of the leadership produced by student movements in the past thirty years, he could point to only one truly national name, Kanhaiya Kumar, whose prominence emerged from the JNU sedition case controversy — and noted that even Kanhaiya has not gone on to win a parliamentary or assembly seat in his own right, distinguishing durable activist visibility from actual electoral capture. He drew a further distinction between student politics at Muslim-majority institutions like Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia, where Muslim political articulation is the default backdrop, and at Muslim-minority spaces like Delhi University or JNU, which he described as ideological battlegrounds primarily contested between the Left, Congress and BJP traditions — leaving open, in his account, exactly what distinct role AMU and Jamia's own campus politics has played in shaping Muslim political leadership nationally.
Politics is hard for everyone, and consultants are a symptom
Usmani closed by locating his own profession inside this broader argument about improvisation over design. He credited Modi personally, more than any campaign apparatus, with having created the modern Indian political consulting industry: the scale of messaging experimentation built around Modi's 2014 campaign, he argued, generated a necessity for professional political agencies, rather than agencies engineering Modi's rise from outside. He was candid that consulting work should, in his own view, end with the election event itself rather than persist across cycles, warning that repeat engagements between the same agency and the same party produce a fatigue that dulls the urgency both sides bring to a first campaign — citing I-PAC's 2021 "Didi Ke Bolo" campaign in West Bengal, which he helped lead as the political intelligence unit's state head, as the most rigorous and honest campaign work of his career precisely because of that first-time intensity.
His closing message to Muslim listeners deliberately avoided the language of crisis. Politics, he said, is inherently chaotic, and the task is to manage conflict and uncertainty rather than eliminate them — a discipline, he argued, that a community anxious about its own marginalisation would do well to apply to itself. The way forward, in his account, is not a bigger national gesture but a patient, constituency-by-constituency rebuilding of political literacy: knowing why one is voting, for whom, and to what end, before the next election cycle arrives rather than after the results are in.
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