Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, addressing a rally in Shamli on May 24: “When some people feel offended when we celebrate our festival, how can we be all right when they celebrate theirs? When they can’t respect our beliefs, how do they expect us to respect theirs?”

UP minister Baldev Singh Aulak, addressing a gathering of BJP supporters in Shamli on May 25: “If BJP loses the polls, Diwali will be celebrated in Pakistan.”  

Shamli MLA Tejendra Nirwal of the BJP speaking at a Jat community meeting in Shamli on May 25: The DNA of Jats matches with only that of the BJP.

The humiliating defeats in the Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha bypolls earlier this year continue to haunt the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). If not, it wouldn’t be revisiting the scars of the 2013 riots in the adjoining district of Muzaffarnagar ahead of the May 28 bypoll in western UP’s communally-charged Kairana constituency.

And the bitterness is flowing straight from the top. The speeches of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath—who addressed two big election rallies in Shamli district recently—have featured all possible shades of communal overtones.

On May 24, Yogi mentioned the names of two youths, Sachin and Gaurav, whose murder had triggered the communal riots five years ago. The chief minister also mentioned “riot” and “rioting” at least 10 times in his speech. He also found reason to refer to late Hukum Singh’s “exodus list” on three occasions.

The BJP’s electoral formula for the by-poll is evident: Invoke the 2013 riots, appeal to the Jat community and try and co-opt the political legacy of former Prime Minister and farmers’ leader Chaudhary Charan Singh.

It’s a heady mix.

Charan Singh, nearly a quarter of a century after his death, continues to remain an icon of farmers’ struggle and Jat politics in the region. Using his posters alongside those of BJP candidate Mriganka Singh (the daughter of late Hukum Singh, whose death necessitated the byelection), the BJP is fishing for the support of Kairana’s Jats and other farming communities. The riots are being constantly raked up because hundreds of Jat youth are facing trial in the cases dating back to 2013.

In fact, Hukum Singh himself was an accused in the Muzaffarnagar riots case.  The seven-time legislator, who became an MP in 2014, hit the headlines two years later by releasing a list of Hindu families who had allegedly been forced to migrate out of Kairana over the past several years. The “exodus list” played a key role in the BJP’s unprecedented success in the 2017 Assembly polls in western UP but Singh’s daughter, Mriganka, went on to lose the Kairana seat to Samajwadi Party’s Nahid Hasan.

[Both Hasan and Singh belong to the same Gurjar clan – 84 Kalsyan of Kairana.]

A year on, Mriganka is taking on the Hasan family yet again. Only this time, she is contesting against Tabassum Begum, Nahid Hasan’s mother and former Member of Parliament.

Begum, a Gurjar Muslim, is contesting on a Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) ticket. Traditionally, the Jats have been the RLD’s core voter base. This time, the RLD is being backed by almost all Opposition parties, including the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, as part of a larger strategy to contain the BJP’s all-conquering rise in the state in recent years. The Congress party has not fielded a candiate. Even the Lok Dal, an RLD splinter, has withdrawn the candidature of its leader Kanwar Hasan from the contest. It’s straight fight, therefore, between the incumbent BJP and a united Opposition. And the BJP is struggling.

Setting it back is the lethal caste-community combination working in favour of the RLD and its candidate Tabassum Begum. The Kairana Lok Sabha seat comprises five Assembly segments—that’s a little over 16 lakh voters. According to the BJP’s Shamli district president Pawan Tarar, Muslims alone account for 5 lakh voters. The Jats and the Gurjars have 1.5 lakh voters each. The Kashyaps (an OBC group) and Dalits together comprise 2.8 lakh voters.

While the RLD is expected to employ its traditional influence to garner Jat votes, Tabassum Begum’s name is good enough to have the Muslim votes consolidate in her favour. Making her an odds-on favourite is the support that she hopes to get from the OBC groups that traditionally favour the SP, as well as the BSP’s core voter base of Dalits.

The BJP’s leaders are responding to the challenge by billing the Kairana contest as a must-win for the party, especially after the humiliating losses it suffered in Gorakhpur and Phulpur at the hands of the BSP-backed SP. In fact, former Union minister and Muzaffarnagar MP Sanjeev Balyan speaking at the same rally as Adityanath on May 24, said the result here would set the tone for the party ahead of the 2019 general election when the BJP government at the Centre would be fighting for a second term.

BJP’s new-found love for Chaudhary Charan Singh

Ajit Singh, the RLD chief, is Chaudhary Charan Singh’s son. His hold on the Jat vote bank helped him become a Union minister in the Congress-led UPA government. But the communal riots of 2013 made Singh and his party electorally irrelevant. The party was decimated in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. In the 2017 Assembly elections, only one of its candidates won. That candidate went on to join the BJP. Ajit Singh and his son Jayant Chaudhary, the RLD vice president, are therefore fighting for the survival of their party. Jayant has campaigned extensively in Kairana, holding over 150 corner meetings in Jat villages, hoping to bring back the Jats into the party’s fold.

“Yogiji (Adityanath) has said that people from a particular community are begging for votes in villages to save their existence,” Jayant said in the Jat-dominated village of Malaindi in Shamli. “I don’t feel bad in reaching out to my elders with folded hands to seek votes.”

Jayant has been appealing the voters to “break the ego” of the BJP and that of chief minister Yogi Adityanath. The CM and his deputy, Keshav Prasad Maurya, have responded in kind, terming the RLD-SP-BSP alliance a “thagbandhan (an alliance of cheats)”.

Taking on Maurya, Jayant said, “Chaudhary Charan Singh raised such honest workers that no party can meet those standards even today.” Speaking to Newslaundry, Jayant also rejected the BJP’s argument that RLD was contesting to save its existence. He admitted that “the bypoll is very important for us politically” but “it is very important for the social fabric of this constituency too”.

“The way our people (Jats) have been portrayed in this constituency, it seems as if they are still embroiled in Hindu-Muslim tension,” he added.

Kilometres away, in Silawar village, Jat community elders told Newslaundry that the community adopted a larger Hindu outlook after the riots of 2013 and went on to “vote for the BJP”.

Sudesh Taraar, a 60-year-old farmer and RLD loyalist, explained why the BJP was using Charan Singh in its campaign posters. “After the riots, the Jats voted for the BJP. Now, the situation has normalised and, to win the bypoll, they need our votes. So they are using Chaudhary Charan Singh’s photos,” he said.

The performance of the BJP governments at the Centre and the state is another sore point for some. Jat farmers, such as Satbeer Singh and Som Singh, are critical of the BJP because “of its failures to cater to the farming community”.

“The electricity rates have been raised by this government, the Central government has also failed to check the rise in petrol rates,” Satbeer said. “Chief Minister Adityanath failed to keep his poll promise of clearing all sugarcane dues within 14 days of assuming office.”

In the Jat-dominated villages of Malaindi and Silawar, there also seems to be a sentiment to save the RLD – “a Jat party”.

On May 25, Muzaffarnagar MP Sanjeev Balyan and senior BJP functionary Sunil Bansal organised a meeting with representatives of the Jat community at a farmhouse in Shamli. Several Jat leaders, BJP MLAs and ministers appealed to the community’s ‘sardari (heads)’ to ensure that their people vote for the BJP and repay their “debt”.

“The BJP was the only party which stood by us during and after the 2013 riots,” Amit Rana, a young leader of the BJP and chairman of the Badot Nagar Palika, said. “They have made our people MPs, MLAs and ministers.”

The Muzaffarnagar riots were pretty much all that was spoken about at the meet. “Gaurav and Sachin [the two Jat youths whose murder triggered the riots] sacrificed their lives for their sisters,” UP Minister Laxmi Narayan Chaudhary said. “If Sanjeev (Balyan) and I had our way, we would even erect their statues here.”

Laxmi Narayan Chaudhary subtly reminded the community that the RLD candidate was a Muslim. “We are being forced by a Begum to seek votes for Mriganka. A Begum who doesn’t even know to write in Hindi,” he said. Some MLAs like Shamli legislator Tejendra Nirwal reminded the Jats about the cases of communal riots that were filed against their youth, and told them “the DNA” of Jat “matches only with that of the BJP.”

Another UP minister, Baldev Singh Aulak, warned the voters that if the BJP loses the polls, “Diwali will be celebrated in Pakistan”.

Balyan, when asked about the communal remarks made at the Shamli meeting, said the party does not subscribe to such comments, but insisted that raising the issue of the 2013 riots was justified. “I referred to the riots only when the Opposition parties sought the vote on this issue. They said they would withdraw riots-related cases (filed against people) from Nishad village. It was important that I tell them the truth–that those in the Opposition parties don’t even know the number of cases filed against our youth,” Balyan told Newslaundry. 

Responding to Jayant Chaudhary’s remarks that the BJP’s love for his grandfather Charan Singh was fake, Balyan told Newslaundry: “Jayant may be the biological grandson of Charan Singh, but I could be his ideological grandson too. No one has a patent on leaders like Ambedkar and Charan Singh.”

Can communal narrative sway the bypoll

In 2013, during the communal riots in Muzaffarnagar, Kairana remained largely peaceful. Besides a few aberrations in four or five Shamli villages, all communities were successful in maintaining communal harmony in the district.

Kairana’s political space is largely dominated by the Gurjar Hindu-Muslim communities. Samajwadi Party leader Munawar Hasan has represented the Kairana Assembly seat as well as the Kairana Lok Sabha constituency several times. In 2009, his wife, Tabassum Begum, the current RLD candidate, garnered 39 per cent votes, defeating BJP’s Hukum Singh. In 2014, Kairana legislator Hukum Singh defeated Begum’s son Nahid Hasan. Three years later, in the Assembly election, Nahid Hasan defeated Singh’s daughter Mriganka Singh by over 20,000 votes.

A senior Samajwadi Party leader, who has been camping in the Shamli for the past month, said the RLD has an edge over the BJP this time. “The BJP has failed to polarise the voters in Kairana so far. Despite all its attempts, the Jats have remained Jats–and have not become ‘Hindu’ voters,” he said.

SP chief Akhilesh Yadav has consciously stayed away from the campaigning in Kairana besides giving away the seat to a party struggling to stay relevant. The SP’s direct involvement in the polls would have allowed the BJP to push the Hindu vs Muslim narrative.

The RLD’s image primarily is that of a Jat community party, which has become a deterrent in pushing a more polarising narrative. Had Akhilesh, who was the CM when the riots took place, joined the campaign, it would be the first time, since 2013, that he would have addressed a political meeting attended by both Jats and Muslims.

“The BJP’s repeated challenge to Akhileshji to hold a rally in Kairana rang the alarm bells. Had he addressed a rally, and any untoward incident would have taken place between the two communities, things would have gotten out of hand,”ana SP senior leader said on the condition of anonymity.  

Simmering Dalit anger

“We know that the Saharanpur incident [of 2017] and the Bhim Army issue won’t do our prospects with the Dalit voters any good. We will hardly get 10-15 per cent votes from Dalits,” a Shamli-based Jat BJP leader said. The BJP’s district president Pawan Taraar also said that the Shabbirpur incident has further disillusioned the party’s Dalit supporters. Of the five Assembly segments of Kairana Lok Sabha constituency, two are part of the Saharanpur district.

The caste-based violence against the Dalits of Shabbirpur and the arrest of Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar ‘Ravan’ has sparked anger among the Dalit community. Although a Dalit faction does back the BJP in western UP, the Dalit vote bank, all together, is too big and diversified to manage.