Eye on Muslim votes, Akhilesh plays ‘Azam card’ ahead of phase 1 polls

LUCKNOW Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav is pulling out all stops to consolidate Muslim votes for his party and Congress candidates with 13 Muslim dominated constituencies going to polls in the first and the second phases of the Lok Sabha elections. On Friday, he went to the Sitapur jail and huddled with party leader Azam Khan in an apparent attempt to send a message to Muslim leaders and the electorate that he is with Khan.
“I discussed Rampur and other LS seats with Azam Khan saheb. The government has been doing injustice to him and family. It is inhuman…this government has set a world record of fake cases (against rivals). But one day justice will come to him. Time is powerful,” said Yadav speaking to media persons in Sitapur after meeting Azam.
Rampur, the seat Azam Khan won in the 2019 LS polls, and seven other seats are going to polls in the first phase on April 19. The SP has not declared any candidate for the seat yet and party sources said Akhilesh also consulted Azam Khan regarding selection of SP candidates for Rampur, Moradabad, and Bijnore seats – considered the region of Azam’s influence.
Azam, his wife and former Rajya Sabha MP and former Rampur MLA of SP Tazeen Fatima, and their son Abdullah Azam, former Suar (Rampur) MLA are in jail and cannot contest polls. In October 2023, they were sentenced to seven years in prison in a four-year-old case related to the alleged forgery of Abdullah’s birth certificate. The SP thinks the BJP government did vendetta politics against Azam and his family.
Muslims account for 19% of UP’s population and their voting behaviour is likely to define the outcome of 13 LS seats with 18-42% Muslim population. All these seats would go to polls in the first two phases among the total 16 seats.
The Muslim dominated seats in the first two phases are: Saharanpur, Bijnore, Nagina, Moradabad, Rampur and Amroha (which the SP-BSP alliance had won in 2019) while Kairana, Muzaffarnagar, Pilibhit, Meerut, Baghpat, Bulandshahr and Aligarh went to the BJP.
Aligarh has roughly 18% Muslim electorate while Rampur has 42% and the other constituencies fall in between.
“The SP-Congress alliance will get a large share of the Muslim vote in the 2024 Lok Sabha election,” said SK Srivastava, a political observer.
Of these 14 Muslim dominated seats, the SP is contesting 11 while its INDIA bloc partner – the Congress will contest three – Saharanpur, Amroha and Bulandshahr.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) too is wooing Muslim voters and so is the BJP through its Pasmanda Muslim outreach.
The Samajwadi Party deployed the OBC-Muslim-Dalit formula in the 2022 UP assembly polls, which increased its tally from 47 seats in the 2017 assembly election to 111 seats in the 2002 assembly election. The BSP bagged only one seat. The SP is relying on the same formula for the 2024 LS polls, but has given the arithmetic a new name – PDA (backwards, Dalits, Muslims).
The party has fielded Muslim candidates on Kairana and Sambhal seats, and is set to field Muslims from Rampur, Moradabad and Bijnore. Alliance partner Congress too has zeroed in on Muslim candidates for Saharanpur and Amroha.
As far as Rampur LS seat is concerned, Akhilesh Yadav had always left the decision on Azam Khan. Even for the 2022 LS bypolls in Rampur, it was Azam’s choice and his lieutenant Azim Raza, who contested, lost to the BJP candidate by 42,000 votes.