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By:

Quaid Najmi

4 January 2025 at 3:26:24 pm

Educated Muslims being hounded: Owaisi

Mumbai: AIMIM President Asaduddin Owaisi has flayed what he termed as a ‘media trial’ in the alleged TCS Nashik conversion case and claimed that educated Muslims youth are being deliberately targeted as part of planned ‘hate campaign’, here on Saturday. Reiterating full faith in the judicial process, Owaisi said that justice cannot be handed out through media narratives or television debates and the law must be allowed to take its own course. “We are seeing a very dangerous trend… Now,...

Educated Muslims being hounded: Owaisi

Mumbai: AIMIM President Asaduddin Owaisi has flayed what he termed as a ‘media trial’ in the alleged TCS Nashik conversion case and claimed that educated Muslims youth are being deliberately targeted as part of planned ‘hate campaign’, here on Saturday. Reiterating full faith in the judicial process, Owaisi said that justice cannot be handed out through media narratives or television debates and the law must be allowed to take its own course. “We are seeing a very dangerous trend… Now, educated Muslims are being picked out for orchestrated allegations and media campaigns. This doesn’t augur well for society and justice itself with the media playing the role of the judge and jury,” said Owaisi sharply. Flanked by the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen state President Imtiaz Jaleel, Owaisi also emphatically said that it was wrong to link his party with the TCS case prime accused Nida Khan, “who will be ultimately proven innocent in the courts”. He expressed concerns over the slur campaign driven by malice and political motives against his party as well as Nida Khan in some sections of the media even before the investigations were completed or a judicial scrutiny. “Merely because some allegations have been hurled at a young woman professional, attempts are being made to paint her ‘guilty’ through media trials, even before judicial scrutiny. But, we have complete faith in the judiciary and are confident that the court will eventually exonerate her,” asserted Owaisi. Public Discourse Raising questions on the probe and accompanying public discourse with stress on the alleged recovery of certain ‘evidence’ from Nida Khan’s home, he sharply questioned: “Since when have a burqa, a niqab or religious literature become objectionable… Is wearing a hijab now regarded as evidence of a crime?” He said that these details along with baseless allegations are sensationalism in the media to create further prejudice against the minority community and reflected a deep-rooted hostility aimed at harassing educated Muslim men and women. Owaisi pointed out that a complaint in the TCS Nashik case was filed by a leader linked with the ruling party, and as per the software giant’s statement, Nida Khan was not with its HR Department and transferred even before the controversy erupted, contradicting several media reports. Of the nine cases lodged in the matter till date, in one case, she was accused of hurting religious sentiments, but nobody can comment on it before the court pronounces its verdict, he pointed out. Court Fight Dismissing attempts to drag and link the AIMIM into the row, he referred to a party Municipal Corporator Matin Patel who was booked merely on the basis of certain allegations and vowed to contest the matter in the court. Here Owaisi cited multiple examples of educated Muslims being scrutinised – including in Delhi when some educated youths were arrested for possessing a book by the legendary Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib and they were later released. There was another one from Allahabad where some Muslim boys were targeted for writing an Urdu ‘sher’ (couplet) prompting judicial intervention, and predicted that even in the Nashik TCS case, the truth will ultimately prevail as no criminal charges against Nida Khan may stand. AIMIM to set up voter help-desks AIMIM President and Hyderabad MP, Asaduddin Owaisi said his party is developing a digital application containing electoral records of all 288 Assembly constituencies in Maharashtra for 2002-2024, to help voters in the SIR process. For this, the AIMIM will set up help desk centers in its strongholds to facilitate the process and ensure proper utilisation of voter data. Alleging discrepancies in electoral records, he said such errors create huge problems for the voters, especially the poor or illiterates. Owaisi mentioned how of the nearly 27 lakh names placed in the adjudication list in West Bengal, “90 pc were poor Muslims.” These centers would be open for all Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Dalits, Adivasis and the general public needing assistance with the electoral records.

New-Age IPOs Are Re-Wiring India’s Growth Story

The narrative has moved beyond the glitz of unicorn status to the grit of the balance sheet.

In 2025, India’s IPO market quietly crossed a symbolic milestone of more than Rs 1.7 lakh crore raised in a single year, surpassing even the blockbuster primary issues of 2024. The narrative has moved beyond the glitz of unicorn status to the grit of the balance sheet. While the successful listings of Lenskart, Meesho, PhysicsWallah, and Pine Labs are being cheered for their listing gains, the real story lies in their strategic audacity.


For years, the Indian e-commerce playbook dictated by global incumbents focused on asset-heavy warehouses and a ‘Top 10 per cent’ consumer base. The logic was simple: control the inventory to control the experience. Meesho disrupted this by realising that "Bharat" doesn't need a prime subscription; it needs value. But the real genius, which even the most sophisticated logistics players struggled to master, was their backhaul optimisation. Meesho tapped into the fragmented trucking industry’s greatest inefficiency: the return journey. By intelligently coordinating with third-party logistics to fill trucks that would otherwise return empty from Tier-2 and Tier-3 hubs, Meesho slashed delivery costs to levels that asset-heavy giants simply couldn't touch.


The Data: This operational efficiency helped Meesho shrink its FY24 losses from Rs 1,569 crore to a mere ₹53 crore, leading to an 80x-subscribed IPO—a feat of frugality and scale combined.


Lenskart Edge

Legacy retail houses in India treated eyewear as a fragmented, low-frequency medical purchase. Lenskart turned it into a high-frequency fashion accessory. However, their true disruption was vertical integration. While traditional groups relied on complex distributor networks that ate 30-40 per cent of the margins, Lenskart built its own robotic manufacturing ecosystem. By controlling the journey from the factory floor to the customer’s face, they decoupled quality from cost. In FY25, Lenskart reported a net profit of Rs 297 crore, proving that in a market like India, owning the supply chain is the only way to own the customer.


The Edtech sector was nearly written off after the spectacular collapse of marketing-heavy giants. The industry’s "Big Boys" spent billions on celebrity endorsements and aggressive sales tactics, treating education as a product rather than a service. Alakh Pandey’s PhysicsWallah (PW) achieved what legacy coaching institutes and well-funded EdTechs couldn't: scalable trust. By focusing on a "community-first" approach and keeping fees at a fraction of the market rate, PW built a loyal student base that required zero customer acquisition cost. Their pivot to a hybrid model merging low-cost digital reach with physical centres pushed FY25 revenue to Rs 2,887 crore with a growing profit margin. PW proved that in the Indian heartland, brand affinity is built in the classroom, not on a billboard.


Invisible Infrastructure

Traditional banks viewed the Point-of-Sale (POS) machine as a mere card-swiping tool. They ignored the merchant’s deeper pain points. Pine Labs disrupted this by treating the POS as a "Smart Business Terminal". They layered software over hardware, providing merchants with instant EMI, loyalty analytics, and embedded credit rails. This transformed a passive device into an active revenue generator for small businesses. By delivering back-to-back profitable quarters (Q2 FY26 net profit of Rs 6 crore), Pine Labs showed that the future of fintech isn't in competing with banks but in building the sophisticated "soft power" infrastructure that banks lack.


India owes much of its economic foundation to the Tatas, Birlas, and Reliance groups that built steel plants, financial systems, telecom networks, and global brands over decades. But today’s startup founders start with a problem, not a product. They design for Bharat, not just India. They prioritise technology but worship operational excellence. They scale without waiting for permission.


The Lenskart–PW–Meesho–Pine Labs cohort is not the end of an era. It is the beginning of a new industrial revolution, “Made in India, by India, for India.” And this time, the assembly line is not steel or petrochemicals.


It is creativity, technology, trust, and bold entrepreneurship.


(Disclaimer: Stocks mentioned in this article are not to be considered as a recommendation, and the author does not own any of these stocks.)


(The writer is a Chartered Accountant. Views personal.)


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