The changing colours of symbols and flag positions during an election tell a story. At the Rashtriya Lok Dal head office near the bustling Mahavir Chowk in Muzaffarnagar, the party’s green and white flag is flying above the Bharatiya Janata Party’s flag. At the recent road show of RLD chief Chaudhary Jayant Singh and the BJP candidate Sanjeev Balyan, the saffron party’s lotus symbol took on the unusual shades of green and white.
It appears that the BJP is allowing its small but influential partner to take the lead in this critical constituency in western Uttar Pradesh that it won by a whisker in 2019, when Mr. Balyan defeated Mr. Singh’s father and the RLD’s then-supremo Ajit Singh, who was then a joint candidate of the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, by only 6,500 votes.
Ajit Singh, who worked for Hindu-Muslim unity after the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013, died of COVID in May 2021. This time round, his son is not just seeking support for Mr. Balyan, who emerged as a Hindutva leader after the riots, against the Samajwadi Party’s senior Jat leader Harinder Malik; he is also making it a prestige issue, as a sort of return gift for the BJP’s decision to bestow the Bharat Ratna on his grandfather and former Prime Minister Charan Singh.
In conversation with Anuj Kumar, Deputy Editor at The Hindu.
Presentation: Sobhana K. Nair
Guest: Anuj Kumar
Production: Shibu Narayan
