In an indication that the Opposition in Uttar Pradesh stands united for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress has extended support to the joint candidate Tabassum Hassan fielded by the Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) for the Kairana Lok Sabha bypoll. The party’s move stamps out all misgivings about Opposition unity in the State which has 80 Lok Sabha seats.
Kairana is being seen as a test case for both the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in UP as well as the united opposition in many ways. The right-wing social engineering, which saw Jats and Muslims pitted against each other following the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots and gave the saffron party huge advantage in the 2014 Lok Sabha and 2017 Assembly polls, is on the wane since.
Recent efforts of SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav, RLD chief Ajit Singh and local community leaders have brought a thaw in the relationship between the two communities as both sides decided to withdraw case filed against each other in the aftermath of the 2013 riots which saw 62 deaths and more than 50,000 displaced.
The alliance’s candidate, Tabassum Hassan, herself represents, in a way, the merger of various political undercurrents into one united opposition. She won the Kairana Lok Sabha seat in 2009 from the BSP and is now in the SP but will contest on an RLD ticket.
Her husband, Munawwar Hasan who represented SP and BSP, was a three-term MP, two-term MLA and one-term MLC. Their son, Nahid Hasan, is the sitting MLA from Kairana on an SP ticket. He defeated MP Hukum Singh’s daughter Mriganka Singh by over 20,000 votes in 2017 Assembly polls.
The Lok Sabha seat which fell vacant due to the demise of Hukum Singh will now see his daughter Mriganka Singh pitted against Nahid Hasan’s mother.
In 2016, months before the Assembly polls, MP Hukum Singh had raised the exodus issue which grabbed national headlines when he released a list of 250 Hindu families, claiming that they had left the town due to fear of criminals from the minority communities, who were allegedly patronised by the then SP government in the state. The issue, however, had no impact on the Kairana polls which saw his daughter get defeated.
It is important to note how former PM Chaudhary Charan Singh brought Jats and Muslims, the biggest two groups in western UP, together in the early eighties and stitched together a formidable social fabric which was disturbed only by the right-wing leaders in the run-up to 2013 riots. Some of the riots accused, like Sanjeev Balyan, Sangeet Som and Suresh Rana, were later rewarded by the BJP with plum positions in the Union and state governments.
Following the drubbing that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received at the hands of SP-BSP joint candidates in the recent Phulpur-Gorakhpur bypolls, speculation was rife that the Congress might not support the grand alliance. The Congress not only contested separately but their candidates forfeited their deposits in both the seats.
Congress leaders, however, had maintained unofficially that there was a perfect understanding among the Opposition parties and that they couldn’t withdraw nominations of their candidates from Phulpur and Gorakhpur because the alliance between SP and BSP was finalised just days ahead of the bypolls and the campaign for the two seats had already begun.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi enjoys a personal rapport with both SP chief Akhilesh Yadav and RLD’s Jayant Chaudhary.