Shamli (Uttar Pradesh), March 11 (IANS) Kairana that has remained a political hotbed since 2016 when BJP MP Hukum Singh had alleged Hindu migration from the township, has created a record of sorts this time.
The constituency has ensured a hattrick for both, the winner and the loser.
Samajwadi Party’s (SP) Nahid Hasan won his third election from behind the bars in Kairana while for BJP’s Mriganka Singh, this was her third defeat in a row.
Nahid Hasan won by a margin of 26,333 votes late on Thursday.
“Kairana has rejected the politics of so-called ‘exodus’ and it is better for the BJP to bury this issue once and for all. It didn’t work the last time, and neither this time. They failed to monetise it politically,” said Iqra Hasan, Nahid’s sister, who campaigned extensively on behalf of her brother whose name was repeatedly used by senior BJP leaders in speeches to target the SP on the law-and-order issue.
“The more BJP made things difficult for us, the more voters of Kairana became determined to give them a befitting reply,” said Iqra.
Kairana has witnessed a political battle between the two families — the Hasans and the Singhs for years now.
The late Hukum Singh, BJP leader and MP from Kairana, had raised the issue of ‘Hindu exodus’ in 2016 when he had pulled out a list of ‘250 families’ who, he claimed, had left the place due to poor law and order. The issue had kicked up a political storm and the BJP made it a poll plank in 2017 when Hukum’s daughter Mriganka Singh was fielded from the seat.
Though BJP won 325 seats in the state at that time, Mriganka lost to Hasan.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the party again made exodus an issue and repeated it in these polls. Hukum Singh died in 2018 and Mriganka was nominated as the BJP candidate for the Lok Sabha bypoll, but was defeated by Hasan’s mother Tabassum Hasan, who fought on an RLD ticket.
–IANS
amita/dpb
