This is fairly old news: to expand MIM beyond Hyderabad, specially where Muslims speak Telugu (and to improve rapport with Telugu-based parties), Owaisi decided to learn Telugu and hired a tutor for that purpose.
Let us go back in history a bit. In 1981, when I moved to Hyderabad (aged 15), with no facility to speak in Hindi (urdu is referred to as Hindi in Hyderabad; another time about this fallacy), I was not able to cope because in the streets everyone spoke Hindi. At college, I used to try broken English in response to Hindi talk of others. They used to call me 'Spoken English'. When I see posters advertizing Spoken English classes, even now I cringe.
Over time, a lot of change happened. The common muslim auto driver speaks in Telugu. Muslims are in general not averse to speaking in Telugu.
Owaisi's decision will go a long way in integrating the two communities.
The day Hindus and muslims develop genuine rapport, linguistically - true communal harmony will be established in the city.
On the other hand, there is a disturbing tendancy in Kerala, where many important Muslim writers wrote in Malayalam (To be fair, there are many muslim writers in Telugu as well) and everyone spoke Malayalam - now there are some people who are gravitating toward Urdu (in speech).
Which language one speaks is a personal choice but I am only talking of trends.
Kudos to Asad bhai.
Sankara
the language enthusiast
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