BSP’S major minority problem: few known Muslim campaigners

Party has put up 99 minority candidates but not many leaders from the community in key areas

DESPITE FIELDING 99 Muslim candidates — a record high for the party — and basing its gameplan to a large extent on the Dalitmuslim plank, the BSP does not have many popular Muslim faces to take on the heavyweights campaigning, and contesting, for its rivals, especially in the Samajwadi Partycongress alliance.

Muslims form around 18 per cent of the state’s population, and the BSP has fielded Muslims on 50 of 140 seats going to polls in the first two phases, but its list of 40 star campaigners has just three leaders from the community: party general secretary and west UP in-charge Naseemuddin Siddiqui, his son Afzal, and party coordinator for Aligarh and Agra divisions Shamsuddin Raeen.

For SP, star campaigners include Cabinet minister Azam Khan, who is from Rampur; minister Kamal Akhtar from Amroha; Rajya Sabha MP Javed Ali Khan, who comes from Sambhal; Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s close aide Javed Abdi from Amroha; minister Ahmed Hasan; former MLC Khwaja Haleem; state president of Mulayam Youth Brigade Mohammad Ebad; and Abu Asim Azmi, president of SP’S Maharashtra unit.

Campaigning for alliance partner Congress are leaders such as the party’s UP in-charge Ghulam Nabi Azad, former Union minister Salman Khurshid, Ahmed Patel, Shakeel Ahmed, Zuber Khan, Shakeel Ahmed Khan, and Rizwan Zaheer.

BSP leaders from western UP admitted that their three Muslim star campaigners are not too popular within their community in the area, mainly because they do not belong to the region. Siddiqui is from Banda and Raeen from Jhansi, both in Bundelkhand — a region with the smallest Muslim population among UP’S four regions.

The Congress has fielded candidates such as Imran Masood, who gained prominence in Saharanpur following his controversial remark about Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls (he had threatened to "chop Modi into pieces"), while Asaduddin Owaisi of AIMIM has been attracting Muslims, especially youths, in his rallies and programmes in the state.

BSP’S Rajya Sabha MP Munquad Ali, who is from Meerut and was the party’s in-charge for west UP till 2014, has not been named as a star campaigner in the region. He said he will stay in Allahabad, Varanasi and Mirzapur divisions in eastern UP, where he is the party’s zonal coordinator.

BSP’S Meerut division ‘bhaichara’ coordinator Haji Sabeel, however, said the BSP’S campaign is stronger than those of other parties at the grassroots. "Star campaigners will campaign across the state but there are workers who are campaigning at the local level. Naseemuddin Siddiqui-ji is holding four to six public meetings each day. He addressed seven meetings in Meerut in one day. Today, he addressed rallies in Khurja and Shikarpur segments of Bulandshahr. We are getting great response," Sabeel said on Friday.

Party chief Mayawati has been trying hard to forge a Dalit-muslim combination in support of the BSP. On Thursday, she inducted jailed gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari, his son Abbas and brother Sibgatulla into the party and made them candidates from Mau, Ghosi and Mohammadabad seats, respectively. The move is being seen as an attempt to counter the Sp-congress alliance’s grip on the minority community.

Mukhtar’s elder brother and former MP Afzal Ansari offered to campaign across the state to "expose" Akhilesh, whom he called "anti-minority". Sources said Afzal is likely to campaign for the party in districts surrounding Varanasi and Azamgarh. They also said that the absence of SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav at the helm of the party’s campaign gives BSP a better chance at wooing Muslims.

As part of their campaign, BSP leaders have also been speaking of three incidents to suggest that Muslims are not “given respect” in SP: sidelining of gangster-turnedpolitician, Atiq Ahmed; Akhilesh loyalist Javed Abdi allegedly being shoved by Shivpal on the dais during SP’S silver jubilee celebrations in Lucknow; and a spat between Akhilesh supporters and MLC Ashu Malik, a Mulayam loyalist, at the SP office during the family feud.