In an action replay of the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, 13 Muslim candidates from the Samajwadi Party-Rashtriya Lok Dal (SP-RLD) alliance and 17 candidates from the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) will contest for 58 seats in the first phase. Elections on February 10 in West UP where Muslim population is more.
This means that in the first phase, around 22% of election tickets have been allotted by the SP to Muslim candidates, while the share of the BSP is around 29%. According to the website of the Election Commission of India (ECI), News18 collated this information through official lists of both the parties and nominations filed by the candidates.
In the list of 109 contenders announced for Phase 1, BJP has not distributed any ticket to any Muslim. This is expected to help the BJP in the said seat as Muslim votes may get divided. In the 2017 assembly elections, in seven of the said 58 seats, both the SP-Congress alliance and the BSP had Muslim candidates. The BJP had won all the seven seats.
The eight seats where both SP-RLD and BSP have fielded Muslim candidates are Thana Bhawan, Siwalkhas, Meerut, Meerut South, Dhulana, Bulandshahr, Koil and Aligarh. After Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s “80 vs 20” remark about voter support for the BJP, the SP thinks Muslims will unite behind it to defeat the BJP, but the BSP has always been popular among the community in West UP. Got good support. In the first two phases of the 2017 elections in West UP, Muslims are believed to have largely supported the BSP.
Like in the 2017 elections, the SP-led alliance has not given ticket to any Muslim candidate for six seats in Muzaffarnagar district. This has been in the backdrop of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar communal riots, in which there were differences between Jats and Muslims, and since then, Muslims allied with the SP or BSP and Jats increased their loyalty to the BJP. The SP-RLD alliance, however, has given four tickets to Muslims in Meerut district and Nahid Hasan in Kairana.
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