‘Bihar no yardstick’: Trinamool shrugs off Owaisi’s success along border areas
Times of India | 16 November 2025
Kolkata: With Asaduddin Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) winning five seats in Bihar's Seemanchal that shares a border with Bengal, a repeat of the political posturing that was seen ahead of the 2021 Bengal assembly elections appears inevitable ahead of the 2026 polls.
But the Trinamool Congress, on Saturday, chose to dismiss AIMIM as a threat.
Trinamool spokesperson Kunal Ghosh told reporters: "It (AIMIM) will have no impact because everyone in Bengal knows what BJP does to split anti-BJP votes. They also know which parties or organisations BJP tacitly engages for these things. People will identify them in the poll season."
In the recently-concluded Bihar polls, AIMIM found success in Amour, Bahadurganj, Kochadhaman and Baisi — all within Kishanganj Lok Sabha constituency and sharing a border with Bengal.
The fifth seat came in Jokihat, not far from the Bengal-Bihar border.
It's no secret that Owaisi has his eyes firmly set on Bengal. Ahead of the 2021 assembly polls, Owaisi had reached out to Furfura Sharif and had initially announced that his party would field 40-50 candidates in the state. It ended up fielding only seven — mostly in Malda and Murshiabad, and one in Asansol (north). Right ahead of the polls, Trinamool weaned away AIMIM's entire Bengal leadership, including Anwar Pasha.
All AIMIM candidates lost the polls.
AIMIM, however, has not allowed this setback to rupture its Bengal ambitions. In June this year, Trinamool's outspoken Bharatpur MLA Humayun Kabir had claimed that Owaisi had called him with an offer to join AIMIM. Kabir had said he had "politely said, no thanks". But his sporadic fusillades against his own party have suggested a continued unease.
The demographic and socio-political parallels in Seemanchal with parts of Bengal had prompted Congress to appoint Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, a political veteran and former Murshidabad MP, as one of its three poll observers.
Chowdhury's presence as observer could not, however, stem Congress's losses in these parts of Bihar.
A section of Trinamool, in its own analyses of the Bihar polls, feels AIMIM's success in Bihar was mostly due to Congress's failures. "Bihar cannot be a political yardstick in Bengal," said Ghosh. "The factors at play in Bihar polls are completely different from those in Bengal. In Bihar, BJP's opposition included Congress, which has repeatedly failed against BJP.
But in Bengal, it's Mamata Banerjee, who has been repeatedly winning against BJP," he added.
Asked if Bihar poll results will impact Trinamool's alliance talks with Congress ahead of the 2026 polls, Ghosh said, "In Trinamool, we believe we are self-sufficient under Mamata Banerjee. We have defeated BJP repeatedly on our own. Congress, on the other hand, has failed. So alliance talks are inapplicable for us (in Bengal)."