The Congress party has alleged that AIMIM president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao have hatched a plan to cheat the Muslim community of Telangana by trying to sell the figures that only 9,000 Muslim families were eligible for the ‘Minorities Bandhu’, which the Congress party has been demanding.
TPCC Political Affairs Committee convener Mohammed Ali Shabbir said in a statement that more than five lakh poor Muslim families were eligible to get ₹ 10 lakh each on a par with Dalit families who are being covered under the ‘Dalit Bandhu’ scheme. However, AIMIM has used the data compiled by a Commission of Inquiry in 2015-16 and manipulated it to show that out of 8.80 lakh Muslim households, only 9,000 Muslim families are eligible.
Mr. Shabbir Ali said that the Centre for Development Policy and Practice (CDPP), an NGO, with its misleading analysis of the G. Sudhir Commission report on Muslims claimed that only 1% of the Muslims were poor and this was to deny the Muslims the benefit of ‘Minorities Bandhu’ which the Chief Minister is under pressure to announce.
Shabbir Ali asked on what basis the report arrived at the conclusion that only 8.5% of Muslims were poor and said this estimation was not based on any official data or any scientific analysis. He said Mr. Asaduddin Owaisi lives in a palace in Vattepally, Shastripuram and if he conducts a survey in the slums of Vattepally, he will find more than 9,000 poor Muslim families there itself.
He reminded that the Sudhir Commission, in its report, pointed out that 43% of Muslims were living in rented houses. “Are those poor Muslim families living in rented houses not eligible to get ₹ 10 lakh assistance?” he asked. Only 19.2% of the Muslims are regularly salaried as per the report, he said.
