Lucknow: From Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and TMC MP Mahua Moitra to BJP leader Ritesh Pandey and CPI(M) politburo member Subhashini Ali, leaders from across the political spectrum have questioned the arrest of Ali Khan Mahmudabad over his remarks on Operation Sindoor.
An associate professor of Ashoka University, the 42-year-old belongs to the erstwhile royal family of Mahmudabad in Uttar Pradesh. Ali teaches at Ashoka University where he is an associate professor and heads the political science department.
The Haryana Police had arrested Ali from Delhi on 18 May following a complaint lodged by a general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Yuva Morcha in Haryana. The complaint was filed 17 May. His case has now reached the Supreme Court.
”I am still firm with my stand on Ali Mahmudabad. His post was misunderstood by those who made a complaint. He was never a controversial guy. We shared a good bond. His work for society is commendable,” Pandey, an ex-MP from Ambedkar Nagar, told ThePrint.
Prayagraj BJP MLA Harsh Vardhan Bajpai, too, extended support to Ali. “I have read his Facebook post. I noticed there was nothing controversial in it. What was the point of such arrest, I really do not know. This is awkward that an intellectual got arrested for writing facts,” he told ThePrint.
But it’s not just political leaders who have come out in his support, as the likes of Amnesty India and stakeholders from the academic world also condemned the action taken against the professor.
ThePrint looks at Ali Khan Mahmudabad’s background and how he is linked with the world of politics, academics and arts.
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Erstwhile royals, political links
Ali’s father Mohammad Amir Mohammad Khan also known as ‘Suleiman’ was the only son of Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan, the last ruling Raja of Mahmudabad and long-time treasurer and financier of the Muslim League in the years leading up to the partition of India.
Suleiman himself was a former two-term Congress MLA between 1985 and 1991 from Mahmudabad. In 1991, he lost to BJP’s Narendra Verma in the pocket borough. In 1996, the Congress filed its old loyalist and former MLA Ammar Rizvi from that constituency.
His decades-long legal fight to reclaim the erstwhile royal family’s properties seized by the government under the Enemy Properties Act is well-known.
“Suleiman did not leave the Congress but distanced himself from the party activities when he did not get any help from the top leadership in his struggle to claim his properties in the Awadh region,” claims a senior UP Congress functionary. Suleiman passed away in October 2023 after a prolonged illness.
Ali’s mother Rani Vijaya hails from a renowned family of Udaipur. His paternal grandfather Jagat Singh Mehta was a civil servant, diplomat, and academician. Mehta served as India’s foreign secretary from 1976 to 1979. His maternal uncle Vikram Singh Mehta, a business executive-turned-analyst, is chairman at the New Delhi-based public policy think tank Center for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP).
Like his father Suleiman, Ali did his schooling from Lucknow’s La Martiniere College and went abroad for higher studies. After completing his studies at Cambridge in the UK and Damascus in Syria, Ali returned to India where he is now known as a multilingual political scholar focused on writing on South Asian and Middle Eastern politics, communal harmony, and Muslim identity.
Ali wrote a book, ‘Poetry of Belonging: Muslim Imaginings of India 1850–1950’, in which he mentioned about the north-Indian Muslim identity through poetry. He is married to Onaiza Drabu, a Kashmiri anthropologist and writer. She is the daughter of former J&K minister Haseeb Drabu.
Following his father’s path, Ali entered politics in 2017 but he chose to go with the Samajwadi Party. He made an entry in SP circles when Akhilesh Yadav was the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Due to his connections, Ali helped several foreign dignitaries to meet Akhilesh.
He was appointed as a national spokesperson of the Samajwadi Party in 2019. He was considered among the closest associates of Akhilesh till he was active in the party in 2022. Since 2022, Mahmudabad has not held an official post in the party but SP functionaries claim that he is still a part of a core circle of Akhilesh with direct access to the party high command.
”There was a time when Ali was considered a core member of the think tank of the Rashtriya Adhyaksh (party chief). He had a major role in preparing English content for the party but due to his professional commitments and because we were unable to form a government in 2022, he decided to focus more on academics. Still, he is with the party. Almost every Eid, Akhilesh ji visits his palace,” a SP functionary told ThePrint.
Close associates of Ali’s family claim that the properties of the Mahmudabad family are spread in Lucknow, Sitapur, and Uttarakhand’s Nainital. In Lucknow, they are said to own properties, including the Butler Palace, a large section of Hazratganj market, Halwasiya market, and Mahmudabad Qila, worth several thousand crores.
”The family reputation of Ali’s family is very high. They have connections across parties and also in bureaucracy. His father was famously called as ‘Raja Saheb’, who focused on the education of his children. Ali studied in top institutions abroad, yet remains connected with his roots. He knows multiple languages and also has a good hold on Urdu,” Syyed Hussain Afsar, a Lucknow-based family friend, told ThePrint. “It is unbelievable that the Haryana Police arrested a scholar. His social media post was misinterpreted.”
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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