The crucial Lok Sabha bypoll in Kairana in western Uttar Pradesh is expected to settle many things regarding a possible opposition unity alliance in the 2019 General Elections.
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Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) leader Jayant Chaudhary has been campaigning extensively for his party’s candidate, Tabassum Hassan, whose candidature has been supported by the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), aggressively making the point that the poll is about livelihood issues rather than communal flash points.
“We have been doing a micro campaign for the last few weeks, and we have not held a single large meeting. Our feedback is that this election is about ganna (sugar cane) rather than (Pakistan founder) Jinnah (referring to the controversy over Jinnha’s picture being hung inAligarh Muslim University),” he told The Hindu in an exclusive interview. Ms. Hassan has been pitted against Mriganka Singh of the BJP who is also the daughter of the late MP from Kairana, Hukum Singh, whose death necessitated the bypoll.
“I have not used a single bus to cart crowds to big meetings etc, we have been deliberately going to villages and corner meetings for a more hands on campaign. What we have seen gives me confidence that we will win. In fact the issues we have flagged have forced (Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister) Yogi Adityanath to talk about sugar cane dues and employment, subjects that his government is defensive on, rather than communal subjects,” he said.
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On being asked about the fracture of his party’s fractured vote bank in the aftermath of the Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013, Mr. Chaudhary said that his party had been doing bhaichara (amity) meetings in small panchayats across western Uttar Pradesh for more than a year. “I don’t feel brushing things under the carpet works, we found that people are ready for a rapprochement, and agrarian distress is spurring them back to the old organic social equations that were there before. We also learned that before the big riots in 2013, there were a series of small incidents that led to the big one, and that we need to nip these in the bud when these small incidents take place,” he said.
He remarked that he had been questioned a lot on why the party had fielded Ms. Hassan, a Muslim, where a Jat candidate may have sufficed to attract back the vote of the community in the face of a unified Hindu vote that the BJP had been able to garner. “I want to break the dangerous idea that no political party in this country is interested in giving representation to Muslims. This is a seat with a sizeable population of Muslims, and we have given the seat to a Muslim,” he said.