The wounds of the communal divide, created by the riots last year, have not healed yet. But the people of Kairana constituency, spread over Shamli and Saharanpur districts, have decided to move on and vote for development in the Lok Sabha election.
The main candidates in fray are local MLA and senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Hukum Singh, Rashtriya Lok Dal candidate Kartar Singh Bhadana, Samajwadi Party candidate Nahid Hasan and his uncle Kunwar Hassan, fielded by the Bahujan Samaj Party.
“Mr. Hukum Singh, at the moment, seems comfortably placed as the Muslim votes here are likely to be divided among the SP, the BSP and the RLD candidates,” said Ranvir Singh, a schoolteacher in Shamli.
“Vote for Mr. Modi and put an end to decades of exclusion of Kairana by the governments at Lucknow and Delhi. I promise to develop Kairana into a model constituency with all basic facilities and industry,” Mr. Singh said while addressing a small gathering in a village.
RLD candidate Mr. Bhadana is banking on Jat support, courtesy his party chief Ajit Singh. The debate over reservation for Jats, however, is not a poll issue here as Mr. Bhadana is a Gujjar from Haryana.
The uncle-nephew duo of Kunwar and Nahid are banking mainly on Muslim vote. The people, however, are not very happy with the Hassan family as the outgoing BSP MP and mother of Nahid Hassan, Begum Tabassum Hassan, has not done much to develop the constituency during her term.
At Bahavadi village, deserted lanes and locked houses greet visitors as their inhabitants, Muslims families which fled during the riots last year, are reluctant to return.
