LUCKNOW: After wresting the Kairana Lok Sabha seat from the BJP, an upbeat Rashtriya Lok Dal is attempting another show of unity of Opposition parties in Uttar Pradesh. This time through a grand iftar party scheduled at its state headquarters in Lucknow on Wednesday.
Not only will RLD vice-president Jayant Chaudhary, who led the Kairana bypoll campaign, be present at the iftar, invitations have also been sent to the SP, BSP and the Congress. Personal invitations have been sent to SP chief Akhilesh Yadav, BSP supremo Mayawati and Congress state president Raj Babbar, the RLD said.
The newly-elected MP of Kairana, Tabassum Hasan, will also be honoured in Lucknow and attend the iftar. So will be RLD’s committee members from western UP and leaders who campaigned in Kairana.
This is the first major state-level iftar party held by the RLD after the 2013 Muzaffarnagar communal violence, said RLD UP president Masood Ahmad.
“It is after a gap of 4-5 years that an iftar is being organised in such a big manner and that too with invitations to other leaders,” he told The Hindu .
Mr. Ahmad said that with the victory in a communally-sensitive seat like Kairana, the RLD had emerged as a “champion of communal harmony”.
“We fought against the tide and won in Kairana. There was an atmosphere being created against Muslims... not a single Muslim had reached the Lok Sabha from UP in 2014,” he said.
Ms. Hasan is the sole Muslim Lok Sabha member out of the 80 in UP and the RLD now hopes to bridge the gap between Jats and Muslims to re-emerge as a dominant force in western UP.
In a tactical move, Ms. Hasan, who has been associated with both the BSP and SP, fought on an RLD ticket in Kairana to check potential communal polarisation and engage the crucial Jat votes through the face of Jayant Chaudhary.
With the open support of the SP and Congress and tacit understanding with the BSP, Ms. Hasan defeated Mriganka Singh, the daughter of former MP and BJP senior leader Hukum Singh, by a decent margin of over 44,600 votes.
While Ms. Hasan received 4,81,182 votes (51.2%), Mriganka Singh got 4,36,564 votes (46.51%) in a two-way contest. Ms. Hasan is the widow of Munawwar Hasan, who represented both Kairana and Muzaffarnagar seats in 1996 and 2004 respectively before he died in a road accident in late 2008.
After being swept away by the Modi wave in 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the RLD had fared poorly in the 2017 Assembly elections as well, winning just one seat.
