New Delhi: The political battle between the ‘nawab’ and the ‘sahebzada’ tilted heavily in favour of the latter at this time. In the Rampur constituency, Samajwadi Party (SP) heavyweight Azam Khan is heading towards a triumph over the Congress’s Kazim Ali Khan, the titular nawab of Rampur.
Azam Khan is leading with 1,01,245 votes, while Kazim has just 3374 votes. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Honey Saxena is at second place with 40,105 votes, according to data available on the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) website at 5 pm.
On a nearby battleground, their children faced off for the Suar seat, with Azam Khan’s son, the SP’s Mohammad Abdullah Azam Khan, set to defeat to the nawab’s son, Haider Ali Khan, who contested for BJP ally Apna Dal (Sonelal), by more than 60,000 votes.
The two Muslim-dominated constituencies were locked in a high-profile struggle.
Azam Khan, who is in jail on multiple charges, won for the 10th consecutive time from Rampur. Meanwhile, Abdullah Azam Khan — who had won the Suar seat in 2017, but lost a legal battle and had to go to jail on charges of forgery related to his age — won the seat again.
While Azam Khan has been considered a powerful minister in former SP governments in Uttar Pradesh, his rival, Kazim Ali Khan alias Naved Miyan, is a five-time MLA who represented Suar from 2002 to 2017.
Kazim Ali Khan has in the past contested on SP and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) tickets. In 2012, he contested on a Congress ticket, while in 2017, he became a member of the BSP, but left the party in 2019 and returned to the Congress.
This was the first election for his son, Haider Ali Khan, or Hamza Miyan, a graduate of the University of Essex in the UK.
‘Nawab vs sahebzada’
The political rivalry between the two groups dates back several decades. Kazim Ali Khan is a descendant of Nawab Faizullah Ali Khan, who founded the erstwhile Rampur state in the 18th century.
Kazim Ali Khan’s father, Zulfiqar Ali alias Mickey Miyan — who succeeded his brother as titular ruler — was elected to the Lok Sabha from the Rampur parliamentary constituency for the Swatantra Party in 1967, and for the Congress in 1971, 1980, 1984 and 1989.
After his death, his widow Nurbano, Kazim Ali Khan’s mother, also won the Lok Sabha elections from Rampur twice, in 1996 and 1999.
Azam Khan, who emerged as a young socialist leader fighting for the interests of beedi rollers and textile workers, was first elected to the Uttar Pradesh assembly on a Janata Party (Secular) ticket in 1980.
Revolting against the royal family, which then dominated politics in Rampur, Azam Khan characterised his struggle as one of ‘nawab’ vs ‘awam’ — royalty vs the common people. He went on to become one of the most influential Muslim political leaders in Uttar Pradesh after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.
However, Kazim Ali Khan has often accused Azam Khan of grabbing poor people’s land and resorting to a luxurious lifestyle at the expense of the poor, while holding him responsible for rising crime rates in the state.
But Azam’s son Abdullah has played down the charges against his father and him, stating that they have been accused of petty crimes like “stealing goats and buffaloes, stealing liquor bottles and soil”.
With this win, the Azam Khan family has cemented its position in the Rampur-Suar region once again, pouring cold water on the efforts of BJP ally Apna Dal (S) to penetrate into the Muslim-dominated constituency.
(Edited by Rohan Manoj)
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