Why the Owaisi Brothers of Hyderabad Are More Dangerous Than Nuclear Pakistan

Pakistan’s nukes are counted, tracked, and caged by deterrence. They sit in hardened bunkers, visible to satellites and intelligence assessments, hemmed in by the grim mathematics of mutually assured destruction. A warhead can demolish a city; it cannot, by itself, undo a civilization’s inner bonds. India’s more corrosive threat comes from a different arsenal—rhetoric honed to a blade, grievance engineered into a business model, and theology refashioned as a license to polarize. That threat doesn’t arrive on a missile; it arrives on a microphone. It is embodied, today, by the Owaisi brothers of Hyderabad.

Akbaruddin Owaisi’s infamous boast—if police protection were removed for fifteen minutes, “a hundred crore Hindus” would be crushed—was not a slip of the tongue. It was a design. The remark functioned like a street-level doctrine of deterrence: the implied menace of a sleeping army awaiting only the removal of a referee. It sought to electrify a base with fantasies of power and to remind everyone else that coexistence is conditional, fragile, revocable at any moment. Courts, unsurprisingly, have had to engage the fallout. Years later, a court would direct police to register an FIR for that speech; the remark remains the defining shard of his political persona. 

Asaduddin Owaisi, draped in constitutional diction, performs the other half of the routine. When five men in Hyderabad were arrested in 2016 by the NIA for alleged links to an IS module, he publicly announced legal aid for them. That led to a sedition case being registered and petitions seeking action. One can spin that as procedural due process; it also reads as a careful staging of victimhood politics—be the omnipresent “defender” so that every institutional action can be replayed as persecution. Either way, it was a calculated political signal, not an act of civic neutrality. 

The brothers’ “division of labor” is painfully obvious. Akbaruddin is the blunt instrument, the balcony-orator on an adrenaline high. Asaduddin is the litigator-tribune, fluent in the decibel-friendly cadences of televised constitutionalism. Between them, they have captured a city’s nerves. AIMIM’s bastion—the Old City of Hyderabad—has proved stubbornly loyal, election after election, a fortress of grievance politics where material failure is laundered as spiritual defiance. The party retained its “Old City” stronghold in the 2023 Telangana assembly elections, again locking down seven seats it has held since 2009. This is entrenched power, not episodic protest. 

And yet the aim is no longer provincial. AIMIM’s ceaseless forays beyond Hyderabad—Maharashtra, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka—follow a now-familiar logic: export the grievance model, fragment opponents, bargain for leverage, and entrench the brand as the indispensable broker of Muslim votes. Analysts, not just partisan foes, have critiqued this strategy as one that often fractures anti-BJP coalitions, maximizing AIMIM’s relevance even where it wins little. That is not governance; that is leverage politics in its purest form. 

This is why the comparison to nuclear Pakistan is not mere shock-journalism. A warhead annihilates; demagoguery corrodes. A bomb’s damage is immediate and finite; the corrosion of trust is slow and generational. Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile—estimated in recent years at roughly 170 warheads—can be mapped and modeled; the fallout of a thousand polarizing speeches cannot. Pakistan’s nukes are bounded by doctrine and retaliation; an internal demagogue is bounded only by the next crowd’s appetite. 

The Owaisis practice a politics that does not seek to persuade; it seeks to harden. It doesn’t aim to improve civic life; it aims to convert every civic failure into more grievance to mine. It doesn’t ask voters to audit outcomes; it begs them to relive humiliations. The Old City’s chronic neglect becomes a political asset, not a scandal. The decaying lanes and inadequate sanitation are not a reason to sack underperformers; they become set pieces in an endless morality play about betrayal and siege. The goal is not to lift people out of dependency but to make dependency feel like defiance. (Even when Akbaruddin complains of the Old City’s “neglect,” it is a complaint comfortably compatible with perpetuation—an evergreen grievance that never resolves into accountability.) The Times of India

Strip away the orchestration and something harsher appears. The brothers are not building a path to equality; they are building a fief. It is political feudalism with a theological gloss: a fief sustained by the perpetual mobilization of injury, where development is a diminishing asset because prosperity dissolves resentment’s binding power. Poor, anxious, proud, and angry citizens are easier to keep in orbit than self-confident ones with options. The more stagnant the basin, the thicker the sediment of loyalty.

This is also why their model is exportable. You do not need to deliver first-rate schools to replicate it; you need only deliver an unending drip-feed of existential dread. You do not need modern sanitation; you need modern amplification. A single viral clip can do more work than an entire urban-improvement budget. Every national controversy, every court verdict, every ill-chosen statement by a rival becomes new oxygen. This is a perpetual-motion machine powered by grievance and girded by metaphysical vetoes.

That metaphysical veto is the key. When political claims are smuggled into the sanctuary of the sacred, argument becomes blasphemy and evidence becomes an insult. That is the switch the brothers flip as a matter of craft. They don’t debate on the human plane—jobs, schools, health, safety—because those planes invite audits and results. They escalate to sanctity because sanctity silences cross-examination. The project is to make secular life ungovernable by secular reason.

The remedy, then, is mercilessly secular: eliminate metaphysics from politics. The test of any political claim must be: What is the measurable harm? What is the measurable remedy? What does the dataset say? If the claim is “a Hindu majoritarian tyranny is crushing Muslims,” test it. Muslims sit in Parliament and state assemblies; Muslims command film industries and anchor cricket teams; Muslim professionals occupy the bench, the bar, the faculty, the newsroom, the bureaucracy. Are there injustices? Yes. Are there episodes of bigotry? Yes. Are there structural problems—education, employment, ghettoization—that require targeted policy? Yes. But the apocalyptic portrait peddled from certain podiums collapses against the stubborn fact-pattern of everyday representation. And where the pattern shows discrimination, the tools are secular—law, policy, budgets—not vendetta dressed as prophecy.

Once politics is forced back into the empirical square, the Owaisi routine begins to fray. Akbaruddin’s “fifteen minutes” swagger dissolves when asked for logistics, chain of command, and capability. It is theater, not plan. Asaduddin’s “defender of the besieged” act dissolves when you audit outcomes for his constituents and ask whether per capita income, school completion, sanitation coverage, and women’s safety improved under his fortress of loyalty. If the answer is no, then grievance has been harvested—not to feed the poor, but to feed a dynasty.

Dialectical materialism—useful precisely because it is cold—poses the only question that matters in power-politics: who benefits? Who gets the contracts, the patronage, the soft power, the podium time, the kingmaker leverage when a constituency is kept in a permanent crouch? Not the rickshaw driver who wants a loan. Not the mother who wants a safe clinic. Not the student who wants a decent school. The beneficiaries are those who perform insult on the stage, and then negotiate when the cameras go off. The Owaisis are not priests; they are impresarios of grievance. Their sacraments are press conferences; their pilgrimages are coalition talks.

In this sense, they are more dangerous than an external adversary because they yank politics out of the realm of rule and into the realm of theater, where nothing has to add up so long as it adds to the noise. Pakistan’s nuclear forces cannot make you doubt the neighbor with whom you’ve shared a staircase for twenty years; a local demagogue can. Pakistan cannot turn a pothole into proof of a civilizational war; a clever orator can do it nightly. Pakistan cannot convince your child that a classmate is an enemy by birth; a viral clip can. You can deter a missile; you cannot easily deprogram a population saturated in metaphysical panic.

There is a second reason they are more dangerous: the Janus act. They play victim and prosecutor at once—persecuted when courts stir, triumphant when crowds roar; defenders of constitutionalism in Parliament, arsonists of coexistence on the stump. The system’s very tolerance is used as a ladder to climb above it. They claim every right while scorning every reciprocal duty. This asymmetry tires out decent people, who gradually withdraw from the public square, leaving it to the most theatrical.

Some will object that all this reads like a vendetta against two elected men. It is not. It is a defense of secular ground rules. India is not a dharmashala where metaphysics dictates policy. It is a republic that gave itself a Constitution precisely to protect citizens from those who would convert identity into a permanent emergency. In a republic, leaders are judged by outcomes, not by the decibel count of their indignations. If rhetoric is an industry and injury a brand, we owe it to the citizen to say so plainly.

That plainness must be matched by craft. Reason must be made public-facing, not academic. The antidote to microphone demagoguery is not whispered seminar wisdom; it is prime-time empiricism. When a hate-clip goes viral, the rebuttal cannot be a white paper; it must be a graphic, a number, a chart, a voice with bite. When a “defender” of the community vows to save it, the counter must be a ledger of delivery: kilometers of sewer laid, teachers hired, case disposal times improved, loans disbursed, crimes solved. Fight theater with audits. Fight mystique with measurement.

But audits alone won’t suffice. The country needs secular organizers who will risk the jeers and the cheap shots to insist, on camera and in court and in classrooms, that metaphysics is private and policy is public; that God belongs to the conscience and government belongs to the spreadsheet; that a republic does not kneel to a sermon, however loud. This is not anti-faith; it is anti-feudal. It is a refusal to let any pulpit—mosque, temple, church, or studio—dictate who is a neighbor and who is an enemy.

And because the brothers are not shy about taking their show on the road, India must be equally unshy about taking secular reason on the road. Where AIMIM parachutes to fracture, send organizers to fuse. Where a rally promises salvation, send a clinic to vaccinate. Where a stump sermon roars about insult, open a skills center and hand someone a certification that raises wages by 30 percent. The point is not to out-shout the demagogue; it is to make his show obsolete by changing the script of daily life.

There remains the obvious question: is the “more dangerous than nuclear Pakistan” line an exaggeration cooked for headlines? No—because the internal enemy, when successful, does the one thing an external enemy cannot: he convinces you that your neighbor is the problem and that the solution is permanent mobilization against one another. Nuclear weapons, in the modern world, are political theater bounded by catastrophe; no state uses them lightly because the logic of retaliation is instant and unarguable. Internal demagoguery is catastrophe without the flash: a slow detonation of the social compact, a corrosion that leaves buildings standing but empties the rooms of trust.

Pakistan’s arsenal, after all, sits at an estimate we can cite and argue about. It is quantified by think tanks and yearbooks, dissected by defense journalists, hemmed in by command-and-control. India’s social trust, by contrast, has no command-and-control. It is a commons that can be poisoned by a thousand daily provocations. The poisoners of the commons are always more dangerous than the possessors of distant bombs, because they touch what makes a republic live from one ordinary day to the next: the assumption that our differences are not an excuse to abandon civic friendship.

This is why the Owaisi routine must be answered with ferocity—not the ferocity of counter-hate, but the ferocity of public reason. Don’t indulge their metaphysics; disallow it. Don’t appease their theater; audit it. Don’t chase their headlines; change the subject to outcomes and refuse to leave that ground. If they demand the darkness of sanctity where criticism cannot enter, flood that room with light. If they try to sanctify sedition, desacralize it and call it what it is: a hustle that fattens a dynasty while keeping a community in permanent crouch.

India has weathered empires and invasions and still stands, but no country can survive leaders who convert every policy dispute into a holy war and every failure into a chrysalis for the next outrage. The Owaisi brothers did not invent this style; they have perfected it. And perfection of a bad craft is worse than its invention, because it comes with templates, captions, and franchising rights. You can deter a bomb with a bomb; you can only deter a franchise with an alternative that makes the franchise irrelevant.

So let us be unapologetic. A republic that refuses metaphysics as a political instrument does not insult God; it honors citizens. A politics that insists on outcomes does not deny identity; it protects dignity. And a public culture that treats grievance as a call to measurement, not a license to menace, is not majoritarian; it is modern. The Owaisi brothers can keep their theater. India’s answer must be a stage that ends the show.

References — “Fifteen Minutes of Infamy,” Economic and Political Weekly (editorial contextualizing Akbaruddin Owaisi’s ‘15 minutes’ speech and the politics around it). 
— NDTV report noting the enduring controversy over the “if police are removed for 15 minutes” remark (and subsequent political reactions). 
— The Indian Express: “Asaduddin Owaisi booked for sedition over extending legal aid to ISIS suspects” (2016). 
— Times of India: “Sedition case against Owaisi for legal help remarks” (2016). 
— The News Minute: “Sedition case against Owaisi for legal help to ISIS suspects” (2016). 
— The Indian Express: “Telangana elections: AIMIM retains bastion, repeats 2018 story in Old Hyderabad” (2023). 
— Hindustan Times: “AIMIM retains seven seats in Hyderabad Old City” (2023). 
— The Indian Express: “In AIMIM’s Old Hyderabad fortress, Owaisis sit pretty” (2023). 
— The Wire: “Owaisi and AIMIM’s ‘Expansion’ Has More To Do With Political Survival (and the BJP)” (2022). 
— Times of India: Akbaruddin’s complaints about neglect of the Old City (2025).
— SIPRI Yearbook and press briefings on 2024–2025 global nuclear warhead estimates; Pakistan’s stockpile (~170 warheads).