After giving a blow to the Bharatiya Janata Party in the recent bypolls to the prestigious Gorakhpur and Phulpur lok Sabha seats, the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party combine are now planning to continue the trend by defeating the ruling Party in the by-elections for the Kairana lok Sabha seat as well.
The BJP would find it tough and chief minister Yogi Adityanath would have to re-draw its strategy to retain the seat as any further loss would boost the morale of the opposition parties and they might go ahead with the similar experiment of fighting the Parliament elections on one platform. Interestingly in Kairana, where the bypolls will be held due to death of BJP MP, Hukum Singh, the SP, BSP as well as Rashtriya lok Dal, which also supported SP candidates in Gorakhpur and Phulpur lok Sabha seats, had a big say amongst the voters and a joint candidate would give a tough time to BJP candidate to save the prestige of the Party.
Both the ground report and numbers game looks like the going will be tough for BJP—if faced with such a coalition in Kairana. In the 2014 general election, Hukum Singh polled 5,65,909 votes to defeat SP candidate Nahid Hasan by a margin of around 2.3 lakh votes. Nahid’s uncle Kanwar Hasan, the BSP candidate, came third with around 1,60,000 votes. Kartar Bhadana of RlD, which fought in alliance with the Congress, had notched around 42,000 votes. Not only did Hukum Singh win every assembly segment of Kairana, he overall polled more votes than the SP, BSP and RlD combined. However, in 2014,Modi’s wave swept the entire state so a repeat of similar performance in Kairana now is anyone’s guess. The situation has entirely changed in the last four years as BJP’s vote share has fallen since 2014.
Kairana comprises the five assembly segments of Nakur, Gangoh, Thana Bhawan, Shamli and Kairana. In the 2017 state assembly polls, the BJP’s combined votes in all five seats were about 1.3 lakh less than Hukum Singh’s 2014 total—a drop of 24%. And in 2017, the combined votes of BSP, RlD, and the SP-Congress alliance were greater than the BJP candidate in 4 out of 5 assembly segments of Kairana lok Sabha. Hukum Singh’s controversial actions in the run-up to the 2014 lok Sabha campaign may have won him the Kairana seat in polarised Western Uttar Pradesh at the time, but it subsequently cost him a complete loss of secular votes in the region. None of Hukum Singh’s chosen BJP candidates could win the Kairana assembly segment post-2014. Nahid Hasan defeated Singh’s nephew Anil Chauhan in the 2014 bypoll for Kairana assembly seat. Hasan also defeated Hukum Singh’s daughter Mriganka Singh in the 2017 assembly elections.
Now in the coming bypolls in Kairana the situation could be very different. It’s now expected that SP, BSP, RlD and perhaps even Congress may contest the Kairana lok Sabha bypoll together, bringing together a formidable votebank of castes and communities and newly energised Opposition cadre, that make the BJP’s prospects look quite dim. Sources said that in Kairana, BSP would field it’s candidate with the support of all other major political parties and if they once again get success then the Party would open it’s account in the Parliament as presently it has not a single member