The terribly humid weather did not deter supporters of the Rashtriya Lok Dal’s (RLD) Begum Tabassum Hasan (48) from beating drums and bursting crackers. Ms. Hasan had defeated the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Mriganka Singh by over 50,000 votes in the Lok Sabha by-election here. The result was declared on Wednesday. With her symbolically important victory, Ms. Hasan, the widow of former MP Munawwar Hasan, has become the only Muslim Lok Sabha MP from Uttar Pradesh.
Mriganka Singh is the daughter of Hukum Singh, whose death had necessitated the by-poll. The late Mr. Singh had won the seat with an impressive margin of over 2 lakh votes in the 2014 general elections.
Ms. Hasan who hails from an influential political family in Kairana, told the media that by defeating the BJP in Kairana, “the arrogance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has been buried in dust.”
“I can quite confidently say that our victory would certainty have been much bigger had the faulty EVMs not been used here.I have no hesitation in saying that the BJP will get only three seats in the next general elections,” said Ms. Hasan.
She was first elected to the Lok Sabha in 2009 on a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) ticket after her husband Munawwar Hasan died in a car accident in Haryana in December 2008.
Though she filed her papers as the RLD candidate, Ms. Hasan later received support from the Congress and the Samajwadi Party (SP), and also claimed to have the backing of the BSP. RLD’s vice president Jayant Chaudhary visited Kairana and hailed the victory.
‘Victory of farmers’
“This is a victory of the farmers. The results have made it evident that Jinnah haara , ganna jeeta (‘Jinnah has lost, cane has won’),” Mr. Chaudhary said in response to Yogi Adityanath’s statement — the U.P. CM had invoked the controversy at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and said, “Cane farmer issues are our own, but we won’t let anyone put up Jinnah’s portrait.”
Ms. Hasan’s son Nahid Hasan, the Kairana MLA, told The Hindu that the BJP had lost the by-poll because of “anti-incumbency, failure to fulfil promises made to the farmers and general public at large, and also due to the unity of Opposition parties.”
