Article 104

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

In the modern imagination, the greatest threat to India’s survival is almost always visualized as the bomb: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, rattled and displayed like a saber, a weapon capable of leveling cities and holding a nation hostage with a single launch. For decades, analysts, politicians, and generals have treated this as the supreme menace. Yet India’s real danger may not come from across the border at all. It comes from within, from figures who wield not uranium but rhetoric, not missiles but microphones. Their weapon is not plutonium but propaganda, and their impact, if unchecked, will be more corrosive than any nuclear strike. They are the Owaisi brothers of Hyderabad.

To say that Asaduddin and Akbaruddin Owaisi are more dangerous than Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is not hyperbole. Pakistan’s bombs, after all, are constrained by deterrence. They are visible, counted, tracked, subject to international scrutiny and the iron laws of mutually assured destruction. A missile may destroy a city, but it leaves the civilization intact: the bonds of family, culture, and nationhood, though scarred, remain. An internal elite who corrodes trust from within, by contrast, can dissolve a civilization silently, making neighbors into enemies, poisoning social fabric until the nation collapses under the weight of suspicion and grievance. The Owaisis are not at India’s borders threatening to break them; they are inside India, turning those borders inward, advocating sedition, and sowing the seeds of an Islamic revolution.

The two brothers are heirs to the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), a party whose roots go back to the pre-independence Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen that supported the Nizam of Hyderabad against the Indian Union. Their politics has always been inseparable from religious identity. Unlike national parties that at least pretend to appeal across communities, AIMIM thrives only by deepening communal boundaries. Asaduddin, the elder, presents himself in Parliament as an articulate lawyer, urbane and sophisticated. Akbaruddin, the younger, plays the firebrand, the street orator who spits venom with abandon. Together, they enact a division of labor: one wears the mask of constitutional politics, the other the mask of populist rage. But behind both masks lies a single project—permanent polarization.

The infamous “fifteen minutes” speech by Akbaruddin Owaisi is not just another example of India’s toxic political theater; it is a manifesto in miniature. By declaring that Hindus could be crushed if police protection were removed for a quarter of an hour, Akbaruddin was not simply boasting. He was performing the logic of intimidation: presenting Muslims as a latent army, restrained only by state authority, ready to rise at a signal. It was a speech meant to thrill supporters, terrify opponents, and reinforce the idea that coexistence is fragile, contingent, temporary. A nuclear missile across the border cannot achieve this. Only an internal demagogue can.

Asaduddin, for his part, has cultivated a reputation as a “constitutional” politician, but his actions betray a similar contempt for Indian sovereignty. He was once booked for sedition after offering legal aid to alleged ISIS sympathizers arrested in Hyderabad. His public interventions are designed less to solve problems than to dramatize victimhood, to keep Muslims convinced that they are forever under siege. Both brothers thrive on the same resource: grievance. And grievance, unlike uranium, is infinite. It can be mined endlessly from history, culture, economics, and every real or imagined slight.

What makes the Owaisis particularly dangerous is their ability to translate this grievance into political capital. AIMIM controls pockets of Hyderabad like a medieval fiefdom. The Old City remains underdeveloped, its infrastructure decaying, its people poor. Yet rather than demand roads, schools, or jobs, the Owaisis redirect attention to identity politics. Why ask for sanitation when you can be rallied against “Hindu oppression”? Why demand accountability when you can be told the community itself is under existential threat? This is how poverty is preserved as a political resource: not a problem to be solved, but a wellspring of resentment to be tapped again and again.

Here lies the crux of why they are more dangerous than Pakistan’s nukes. An external bomb can only destroy bodies. Internal demagogues destroy trust. And once trust is gone—once every Hindu neighbor suspects his Muslim neighbor, once every Muslim fears his Hindu colleague—the nation is hollowed out from within. You cannot rebuild that with diplomacy or treaties. You cannot sign a ceasefire with suspicion. The Owaisis do not deal in policy; they deal in poison.

The danger is magnified because their rhetoric cloaks itself in the language of religion. They invoke Islam not as a personal faith but as a political weapon. In doing so, they fuse theology with sedition. It is not just the Indian state they oppose; it is the very principle of secular coexistence. They envision not a pluralist democracy but a community fortified against all criticism, answerable not to reason but to clerics and dynasties. When Akbaruddin mocks Hindu gods, when Asaduddin frames every question as proof of persecution, they are not engaging in debate; they are declaring war on the possibility of shared life.

The answer is not to meet them on the same terrain. To counter theology with counter-theology is a fool’s errand. Chanting the Rig Veda or meditating on the Buddha’s words will not dismantle AIMIM’s machine. The first step must be to eliminate metaphysics from politics altogether. Every claim the Owaisis make must be stripped of its divine costume and examined as a naked political maneuver. They say Muslims are under siege—where is the evidence? They say Islam is oppressed—how do they account for Muslim actors, cricketers, MPs, businessmen, judges? They say Hindu gods are false—what does that prove about jobs, housing, education? Once metaphysics is banished, their arguments collapse under their own emptiness.

Reason is the only antidote. Logical empiricism demands that every claim meet the test of fact; dialectical materialism demands that every act be examined for whose interest it serves. Applied to the Owaisis, both reveal the same result: their speeches serve only their dynasty. The poor Muslim gains nothing but slogans. The Hindu community gains only suspicion. The nation gains nothing but division. Only the brothers gain power, visibility, and wealth. Strip away the metaphysical theater, and what remains is a crude racket of grievance for profit.

This is why they are more dangerous than nuclear Pakistan. A missile can be deterred, tracked, neutralized. But rhetoric that corrodes coexistence is harder to detect, harder to contain, harder to recover from. Nuclear fallout dissipates with time; communal suspicion lingers for generations. The Owaisis are not foreign generals planning invasions; they are elected representatives of a democratic republic using its freedoms to undermine its foundations. In that paradox lies the true peril.

The logic of internal subversion is older than the Indian Republic itself. External enemies may rattle sabers, but it is the internal opportunist who undermines the very conditions of unity. The Owaisi brothers stand in a long line of such figures who discovered that inflaming grievance is more profitable than healing wounds. Their genius, if one can call it that, lies in dressing sedition in the robes of representation. They claim to speak for Muslims, but in truth they speak only for themselves, for their dynasty, and for the preservation of their fiefdom.

Consider how the brothers have built their power base in Hyderabad. The Old City is not just a constituency; it is a captive colony. Every election there is fought not on promises of development but on the currency of fear. Voters are reminded of riots past, of slights endured, of dangers lurking just beyond the community’s walls. The subtext is always the same: only the Owaisis can defend you. This is not representation; it is hostage-taking. The poverty and decay of Hyderabad’s Muslim quarters are not accidents—they are strategic reserves of grievance, preserved so they may be mined again and again.

Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal does not and cannot do this. It may kill, but it cannot colonize the soul. It may flatten buildings, but it cannot turn identity into a permanent wound. Nuclear weapons are blunt, finite, and subject to deterrence. But the Owaisi method is subtle, renewable, and endlessly self-reinforcing. Every time a Hindu politician makes a misstep, it becomes fuel. Every time a court rules in favor of a Hindu litigant, it becomes fuel. Every time poverty endures, it becomes fuel. The brothers have built a perpetual-motion machine of grievance, and they feed on it like parasites on a host.

One cannot understand their danger without understanding their rhetoric. Akbaruddin’s speeches are legendary not for their originality but for their venom. He has mocked Hindu deities, derided secular institutions, and flirted with outright calls for violence. His words drip with contempt not only for Hindus but for the very idea of a plural India. Asaduddin, more polished, couches his language in legalisms and constitutional references, but the underlying thrust is identical: India is a Hindu state masquerading as secular, and Muslims can only survive under siege conditions. This narrative is false, but its repetition makes it real for those who have little access to counter-arguments.

When Asaduddin offers legal aid to men accused of supporting ISIS, it is not because he genuinely believes in their innocence—it is because such gestures reinforce his image as the defender of Muslims against a Hindu state. When Akbaruddin boasts about what Muslims could do if police were withdrawn, it is not because he plans an uprising—it is because the fantasy of power, dangled before an impoverished community, is intoxicating. Both brothers know that the performance matters more than the policy. Pakistan’s bombs, by contrast, cannot seduce; they can only threaten. Their utility ends at deterrence. The Owaisis’ utility begins where deterrence ends.

What makes them more dangerous still is their ability to play both victim and aggressor simultaneously. When accused of hate speech, they cry persecution. When given platforms, they spew invective. When challenged, they appeal to democracy; when empowered, they ridicule it. This Janus-faced strategy allows them to evade accountability while deepening their base. Pakistan must operate under the eyes of international watchdogs, from the IAEA to American satellites. The Owaisis operate under the indulgence of Indian democracy, shielded by the very freedoms they despise.

And yet their threat is not confined to Hyderabad. The Owaisis aspire to national relevance. They have contested elections in Maharashtra, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh. Each time, their message is the same: Muslims are under siege, and only AIMIM can defend them. Even when they fail to win, they succeed in fragmenting opposition votes, thereby inserting themselves as indispensable brokers. Their aim is not governance but leverage. They thrive not by solving problems but by making themselves problems others must solve.

To see why this is more dangerous than nuclear Pakistan, one must appreciate the corrosive effect of internal sedition. Nuclear war is catastrophic but rare; it requires calculations so extreme that most states avoid it. Internal sedition is incremental but constant; it requires only speeches, rallies, pamphlets, and provocations. Its damage accumulates slowly, invisibly, until the social fabric is frayed beyond repair. The Owaisis do not need to launch missiles; they need only to ensure that Hindus and Muslims never fully trust each other again. That is a wound no treaty can heal, no ceasefire can stop.

The deeper danger lies in their weaponization of metaphysics. By invoking Islam as justification for every grievance, they remove their politics from the realm of reason. Once politics is sacralized, argument becomes blasphemy, dissent becomes treason. This is precisely why the remedy must begin with the ruthless elimination of metaphysics from politics. So long as their claims are clothed in divine sanction, they will enjoy immunity. Strip away the sacred, demand evidence, and their empire collapses.

Ask for proof. Where is the genocide they claim looms over Muslims? Where is the apartheid they invoke? The census shows population growth, not extermination. Parliament shows Muslim MPs, not exclusion. Bollywood shows Muslim actors in starring roles, not censorship. Cricket shows Muslim captains, not bans. Universities and courts are filled with Muslim professionals. Persecution exists, yes, but it does not match their apocalyptic rhetoric. Once these empirical realities are brought to light, the Owaisis’ narrative of siege shrivels.

Dialectical materialism sharpens the point: who benefits? Not the Muslim rickshaw driver struggling to feed his family. Not the Muslim student trying to secure a job. They benefit nothing from incendiary speeches. The only beneficiaries are the brothers themselves, who tighten their hold on a constituency by keeping it poor, angry, and dependent. The Owaisis’ politics is not Islam; it is feudalism disguised as faith.

And that is why they are more dangerous than nuclear Pakistan. Pakistan’s bombs cannot reorder India’s democracy. But the Owaisis’ rhetoric, if left unchallenged, can. It can turn Indian Muslims inward, away from integration and toward insularity. It can convince Hindus that Muslims are permanent enemies, thereby justifying their own paranoia. It can turn secularism into a joke and pluralism into a farce. A nuclear bomb explodes once; the Owaisis’ politics explodes daily.

This is not alarmism. It is recognition of a fact too few dare to articulate. The gravest threats to civilizations are not always external invasions. Rome did not fall because its enemies were strong; it fell because its internal cohesion rotted. India, too, will not collapse because Pakistan launches missiles. It will collapse if its citizens no longer believe they share a future. And that collapse is precisely what the Owaisis trade in, day after day, speech after speech, election after election.

The temptation when confronting figures like the Owaisi brothers is to fight them on their own terms: theology with theology, rage with rage, provocation with counter-provocation. This is precisely the mistake they want their opponents to make. Nothing strengthens their hand more than being able to present every challenge as an attack on Islam itself. The remedy is not to fall into that trap. The remedy is to strip their arguments of the divine halo and force them into the daylight of reason. The moment they are asked to prove, to substantiate, to demonstrate, they falter.

This is why eliminating metaphysics from politics is not just an intellectual position but a survival strategy. Metaphysics allows demagogues to escape accountability. Once you claim divine sanction, no fact can touch you, no logic can bind you. To bring politics back into the realm of the empirical is to deny them that escape. It is to say: no, your speech is not sacred; it is a political act, and like all political acts, it must answer to evidence and consequence.

Logical empiricism is the sharpest scalpel here. When Akbaruddin Owaisi boasts about Hindu annihilation in fifteen minutes, empiricism asks: with what? Where are the resources, the organization, the logistics? It exposes the speech as fantasy, a theater of intimidation without basis in material reality. When Asaduddin claims Muslims are perpetually persecuted, empiricism demands proof: what are the literacy rates, the employment figures, the representation in Parliament? Once these numbers are laid bare, the gap between grievance and reality is revealed.

Dialectical materialism complements this scalpel with a hammer. It demands to know who benefits. Who gains when Muslims are convinced that Hindus are enemies? Who gains when Hindus are provoked into paranoia? Who gains when development is postponed because identity is prioritized? Not the common citizen. Not the struggling laborer. Not the young student. Only the dynasty gains. The Owaisis live in comfort and command visibility precisely because their constituents remain trapped in suspicion and deprivation. Their wealth is measured not in policy achievements but in the currency of grievance. Dialectical materialism exposes this for what it is: class exploitation masquerading as religious leadership.

The answer, then, is not metaphysical retaliation but empirical deconstruction. Every time they invoke history, ask for evidence. Every time they invoke oppression, present counter-data. Every time they mock Hindu gods, demand to know how this helps feed a single hungry family in Hyderabad. Every time they invoke revolution, ask who profits when the city burns. Expose the emptiness of the performance, the futility of the theatrics. Once their words are weighed on scales of reason, their grandeur collapses into mere noise.

This is not a battle that can be fought by priests or monks. Hindu ritual and Buddhist meditation, however profound, cannot counter demagogues on podiums. The defense must be led by secular intellectuals who are unafraid to meet theology with reason, and reason with fire. They must be willing to speak where others remain silent, to write where others equivocate, to analyze where others emote. They must not retreat into ivory towers but enter the public square, armed not with scriptures but with arguments, not with rituals but with data.

The struggle will not be easy. Fundamentalists have always had an advantage: certainty. They can promise eternal reward, eternal punishment, eternal truth. Reason can promise only the difficult path of inquiry, the unsettled ground of doubt. But it is precisely this difficulty that makes it more enduring. Certainty collapses when facts disprove it. Doubt survives because it is built to absorb correction. This is why civilizations rooted in inquiry last, while civilizations rooted in dogma crack.

India’s survival as a civilization depends on recognizing this. The Owaisi brothers are not fringe figures to be tolerated as part of democratic variety. They are the symptom of a deeper disease: the infiltration of metaphysics into politics, the conversion of grievance into capital. If left unchecked, they will corrode India more effectively than any missile in Pakistan’s arsenal. A bomb explodes once; their rhetoric explodes daily. A bomb destroys buildings; their speeches destroy trust. A bomb requires rebuilding; their sedition requires reimagining the very nation.

The conclusion is unavoidable: India must fight its enemies within with more ferocity than its enemies without. External threats can be deterred by armies and alliances. Internal threats can only be defeated by reason, relentlessly applied. Every time the Owaisis speak, they must be met not with counter-hate but with counter-proof. Every time they posture as defenders of Islam, they must be unmasked as profiteers of division. Every time they cry persecution, the reality of Muslim progress in India must be laid bare. Every time they invoke revolution, their motives must be exposed as self-serving.

The danger of the Owaisis is precisely that they cloak their sedition in respectability. Asaduddin sits in Parliament, Akbaruddin sits in the state assembly. They are not outsiders hurling stones at the fortress; they are insiders dismantling it brick by brick. That makes them harder to confront, but also more necessary to confront. For if India cannot defend itself against its own elected demagogues, it cannot defend itself against anything.

This is why the comparison to nuclear Pakistan is not exaggeration but truth. Nuclear weapons can end lives, but they cannot end civilizations unless used on a scale unimaginable. Demagogues like the Owaisis, however, can end civilizations slowly, silently, by eroding trust until no shared identity remains. In that sense, they are not just more dangerous—they are the very definition of danger.

India’s answer must be secular, rational, and unapologetic. The nation cannot allow metaphysics to dictate politics. It cannot allow grievance to become permanent currency. It cannot allow dynasties to masquerade as defenders while feeding off division. It must arm itself not with more rituals, but with more reason. For only reason can cut through the fog of demagoguery, only evidence can dismantle the theater of grievance, only truth can outlast sedition.

And so the message must be stated clearly, without hesitation, without apology: the Owaisi brothers of Hyderabad are more dangerous than nuclear Pakistan. They are the enemies within, more corrosive than any bomb, more lasting in their damage than any missile. They are a daily detonation in the body politic of India. And they will not be defeated by outrage, or by counter-dogma, or by silence. They will only be defeated by the relentless pursuit of reason, wielded without fear, without compromise, and without end.