Lucknow: BJP ally Apna Dal (S) Saturday wrested Uttar Pradesh’s Suar assembly seat from the Samajwadi Party (SP) — a major upset for the latter in what’s considered the citadel of former Rampur MP Azam Khan’s family.
Meanwhile, in Mirzapur’s Chhanbey constituency, too, Apna Dal (S) candidate Rinki Kol was leading in a close contest with her SP counterpart Kirti Kol by over 8,000 votes.
The Suar seat, a Muslim-dominated assembly constituency that falls under the Rampur Lok Sabha seat, saw Apna Dal (S)’s Shafeek Ahmed Ansari pull ahead of SP’s Anuradha Chauhan. According to Election Commission data, Ansari has won by 8,724 votes.
Chauhan is a Rajput Hindu, while Ansari, a Muslim, is a former aide of Khan.
Unlike previous elections, both candidates are local residents.
Ansari’s victory comes as a major boost to the ruling coalition and a major upset for the SP, especially given its timing — it comes less than six months after the Rampur assembly seat went to the BJP and a year before the 2024 general election.
The Suar bypoll was necessitated by the disqualification of Abdullah Azam Khan, Azam Khan’s son, as MLA following his conviction in a 15-year-old case.
A Moradabad court had sentenced both father and son to two years of jail in a January 2008 case filed against them for disrupting a public servant from their duty by holding a dharna on a state highway.
Abdullah and Azam Khan had held the dharna after their cavalcade was pulled over by police for verification in the aftermath of a terror attack on a CRPF camp in Rampur.
The battle for Suar has been a significant one, especially given the political developments leading up to it — while SP candidate Chauhan has called herself a “sister” to UP Chief Minister Adityanath, Apna Dal (S) chief Anupriya Patel had dismissed Azam Khan’s potential to pose a challenge.
While both Anupriya and her husband Ashish Patel threw their weight behind Ansari, Adityanath and other senior leaders of the BJP stayed away from the campaign.
Chhanbey’s Apna Dal (S) candidate Rinki Kol is the wife of former MLA Rahul Prakash Kol, whose death of cancer in February necessitated the bypoll.
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Former Azam aide dents SP votebank, Peace Party plays spoiler
Several factors could have dented the SP votebank in Suar, say observers.
These include the transfer of BJP votes to Ansari, Apna Dal (S) candidate’s own support base among the Ansari community — which forms a sizeable part of the population in Suar — and the presence of rival candidates like Peace Party’s Nazia Siddiqui.
Azam Khan’s son Abdullah had racked up over 50 per cent of the votes in the last two elections — in the 2017 assembly elections, his maiden foray, he secured over 51 per cent of the votes, while in 2022, he cornered over 59 per cent.
Chauhan is a former leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) who served as zilla panchayat member as an Independent before joining the SP in 2015.
Her loss came despite Azam Khan’s intense campaigning for her — defying initial speculations that he would stay away, the SP strongman was seen making an emotional pitch to voters through videos and public meetings, where he asked the public to give him “his right”.
At another rally, he launched a tirade against Ansari, stating that he had let down the community (“naat katva di”) by contesting for a BJP ally, even calling him a traitor, but without explicitly naming him.
Sifat Ali, a social activist in Rampur, told ThePrint that while the SP did manage to get a sizeable share of Muslim votes, it wasn’t enough to retain the seat.
“Ansari has held the post of nagar palika chairman twice and won over 35,000 votes. He has won because of the support of the members of the Ansari community who form a major chunk of the Muslim votes. Plus, the BJP’s Hindu vote, too, went with him and this combination upset the SP’s equation,” he said.
The Peace Party’s Nazia Siddiqui is also seen to have played spoiler for the party. — by 2.40 pm, she had got 4,683 votes, according to the Election Commission of India.
A local SP leader who didn’t want to be named attributed this to the Peace Party’s election campaign — according to the leader, the party had begun its political campaign two months before the bypoll was announced in March.
End of the road for Azam Khan family?
Political observers appear divided over 75-year-old Azam Khan’s political prospects, especially given that the SP’s currently out of power.
Khan faces 93 criminal cases in UP and was disqualified from the assembly in October after his conviction in a hate speech case.
“As a political family, Azam would like to pass on the baton or whatever political capital he has left, to his son. Age is not on his side and he is not expected to do spectacularly well and the family may seem to be fading out,” Mirza Asmer Beg, a professor of political science at Aligarh Muslim University, told ThePrint. “Since the SP doesn’t seem to be coming to power in UP in near future, it may well be the end of the road for Azam Khan”.
Still, he says, the leader can’t be dismissed outright.
“Politics is a game of musical chairs where power keeps on shifting between a handful. Azam Khan’s family is a political family and they may still continue to be important ahead of the Lok Sabha polls,” he said.
But SP spokesperson Ameeque Jamei told ThePrint that Azam was one of the tallest leaders of the socialist movement and still remains powerful.
“The BJP thinks that by snatching his membership, they will end his political influence but some leaders are not at the mercy of posts,” he said. “[The SP’s] 110 MLAs in UP assembly, SP members in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha are the family of Azam Khan. It is Azam Khan who decides who gets the ticket (in Rampur).”
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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