Azamgarh: In this election battle of Uttar Pradesh, Azamgarh is stuck in a series of binaries — a terror hub or a historic site of India’s Independence movement, a Yadav stronghold or an exploited votebank, elect a Bhojpuri celebrity or former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav.
The Azamgarh Lok Sabha seat is one of two constituencies in Azamgarh district, the other being Lalganj. As the two seats prepare to vote on 12 May, this eastern Uttar Pradesh district has seen everything.
Its “terror tag” has been dragged in election speeches, and the campaign is replete with nukkad sabhas where Bhojpuri songs and launda naach regale audiences.
“Before 2014, what is the reason that Azamgarh’s name was linked to terrorists?” Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked at a public meeting in the area Thursday.
“Whenever there was a terror attack, agencies used to investigate them and link them to Azamgarh. Why was this happening? What was the reason?” he said.
“The SP [Samajwadi Party] and BSP [Bahujan Samaj Party] leaders here and the government in Delhi were sheltering terrorists only for votes,” Modi added.
Just last week, UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had also attacked the SP and the BSP for turning Azamgarh into a hub of terrorism and crime.
Image under siege
Over 10 years ago, Azamgarh gained notoriety when suspected terrorists belonging to the district were killed and injured in the 2008 Batla House encounter in Delhi. It was branded an alleged recruiting ground of the Mumbai underworld. The Sarai Meer area of Azamgarh, especially Sanjarpur village, where the Batla House accused belonged, became the epicentre of this controversy.
Tarique Shafique, a local activist with Rihai Manch, a UP-based NGO that provides legal aid for wrongful arrests, said the district’s image had taken such a nosedive that people used to have second thoughts about being transferred to Azamgarh.
Senior Uttar Pradesh police officers, on the other hand, say Azamgarh is like any other district in eastern UP.
“Traditionally, Azamgarh had a very bad name due to its links to organisations like SIMI and a certain kind of doctrination of people from Azamgarh, but that kind of activity no longer exists here,” said Anand Kumar, additional director general of police (law and order), UP Police. Though a sensitive district, there has not been much communal- or caste-based hostility in the past couple of years, he added.
Voters here point to Azamgarh’s association with the Indian freedom movement. In 1883, an inter college (for Class XI and XII) called ‘National School’ was established in Azamgarh by noted Urdu scholar Shibli Nomani to impart modern education to Indians.
The website of the college describes it as an institution “bubbling with a very strong feeling of nationalism”.
“This is the place that gave our country stalwarts in the field of literature and poetry like Rahul Sankrityayan and Kaifi Azmi,” said Abdullah, who runs a pharmacy in Sanjarpur village and only goes by his first name.
Also read: Akhilesh Yadav to contest Lok Sabha polls from Azamgarh, Azam Khan to fight from Rampur
Music of the campaign trail
Of the two constituencies in Azamgarh district, the eponymous Lok Sabha constituency is held by the SP, while Lalganj voted for the BJP in 2014.
This election campaign for Azamgarh seat is a lot more colourful than the one in 2014, with the BJP fielding a Bhojpuri singer, Dinesh Lal Yadav aka Nirahua, as its candidate.
In Bhimbar area of Azamgarh, a group of children, women and men gathered around a mango tree ahead of a Nirahua rally Tuesday.
A man pretending to be a woman danced (known as launda naach) to a song that sought to encourage voters to press the lotus button.
Nirahua, who arrived a short while later, delivered his speech in the local Bhojpuri dialect, breaking into songs intermittently. He referred to Akhilesh as “barke bhaiya (elder brother)”.
“My intention is that a meritorious PM like Modi should be elected again… Do not make the mistake that you made the last time, and stand with Narendra Modi…Forget caste,” he said.
Hindus make up 84 per cent of the district’s population, with Muslims comprising 15 per cent, according to census 2011.
The Azamgarh seat has changed hands between the SP and the BSP since 1996. It was only in 2009 that the BJP managed to win the constituency, but the elected candidate was Ramakant Yadav, a local “bahubali” who had represented the seat thrice earlier — twice on an SP ticket and once as a BSP candidate.
In the 2014 polls, SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav won the seat and defeated Ramakant, who was contesting on a BJP ticket, with a margin of around 70,000 votes.
This year, SP chief Akhilesh is in a direct contest with Nirahua.
While most voters believe that Yadav-dominated Azamgarh will lean towards Akhilesh, they also say that Nirahua has lit up the campaign with his ‘nukkad sabha‘ blitzkrieg.
‘Just a votebank’
The Muslim community in Azamgarh district says political parties have used them as a mere votebank. Abdullah said they had been “used and thrown”, adding that he longed for a time when the Muslims would become an independent political force here.
Soon after the Batla House controversy, a new Muslim group called the Rashtriya Ulema Council (RUC) was formed. It has been contesting polls ever since, but hasn’t managed to win even 15,000 votes.
“They moved to contesting elections too quickly. People in the RUC believed that they would ride the electoral tide on the anti-terror tag and Batla incident,” Tahir Madani, a former leader of the RUC, said. “They used it for their personal gains and thus many people left the party.”
Neither of their two candidates in Azamgarh and the neighbouring Lalganj constituency are Muslims in this election.
Campaigning for the sixth phase of polls, scheduled for 12 May, ends Friday evening.
Also read: Akhilesh Yadav is a loser even before the 2019 elections have begun
This report has been updated to correct a typo in the strap.