Lucknow: BJP candidate Brijesh has won from Deoband seat of Uttar Pradesh in the assembly elections of 2022. He has defeated Kartikey Rana of the Samajwadi Party by a margin of 7104 votes. Brijesh Singh got 93890 votes while Kartikey Rana could get 86786 votes. Choudhary Rajendra Singh of the Bahujan Samaj Party remained on the third spot with 52732 votes.
AIMIM’s much-hyped candidate Umair Madani, who is related to the chief of the Darul Uloom Deoband, has got only 3501 votes. Congress’ Rahat Khalil has got just 1096 votes.
It is notable that Deoband is a Muslim dominating constituency. Winning candidate Brijesh Singh of BJP got 38% per cent voters while Kartikeya Rana of SP secured 35% per cent of votes.
The Deoband numbers tell the story. The city has a 71% population of Muslims, but overall, the constituency has a 40% Muslim population. Deoband is in the Saharanpur district and it is known for Darul Uloom Deoband, one of India’s most influential Islamic seminaries. Deobandi school of Islamic doctrine is one of the major Sunni cults many radical Islamic organisations around the world follow the Deobandi school of thought.
Samajwadi Party’s election strategies have been conventionally revolving around consolidating the Muslim votes. BJP on the other hand has fielded Brijesh Singh once again after he has secured a win in 2017 from the Deoband assembly seat. After winning the 2017 elections, Brijesh Singh had said that Deoband will be renamed as Devvrind only if there is a BJP government in the state.
A month before this election, Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath had laid the foundation stone of the ATS training centre at Deoband. It is notable that the exit polls by all organisations had predicted BJP returning to power in Uttar Pradesh.
AIMIM loses deposit
Hyderabad-based Muslim-oriented political party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen has lost deposits in 99 of the 100 seats it contested in the assembly elections of Uttar Pradesh. Though it has gathered some more votes as compared to what it could in 2017, the party led by Asaduddin Owaisi has miserably failed to deliver in a manner it pretended to do especially in the Muslim majority areas and has not won a single seat in the state.
It is notable that, AIMIM had fielded most of its candidates in the constituencies which have a significantly higher percentage of Muslim population and voters. Even in the last assembly elections, when AIMIM had fielded 38 candidates from such Muslim-dominated constituencies, almost all of its candidates had lost their deposits.
Similarly, in the 2022 assembly elections, AIMIM candidates from almost all the contested seats have lost their deposits.
The only candidate to have saved the deposit is Shah Alam alias Guddu Jamali from the Mubarakpur constituency. He was earlier in Bahujan Samaj Party. After leaving the BSP he first approached Samajwadi Party where he was denied a ticket. Then he came to AIMIM and contested the assembly election from the Mubarakpur seat from the AIMIM party. He has got slightly above 24% of the total votes according to the latest updates on the official website of the ECI.
Interestingly, on the Varanasi North assembly seat, AIMIM had given a ticket to Harish Mishra, the surprising non-Muslim candidate by AIMIM in this election. This move of social engineering in Varanasi by AIMIM was seen as equivalent to its alliance in Maharashtra with Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi of Prakash Ambedkar in the 2019 general elections. In those elections, all the Dalit candidates of VBA had contested on the election symbol of AIMIM.
For AIMIM, it is a marginally better performance as compared to that in the assembly elections of 2017. In 2017, the AIMIM party had fielded 38 candidates and they collectively secured around 2 lakh votes. This time the 100 candidates of the party have secured more than 22 lakh votes which is quite a growth in the number of votes if not the per cent vote share. In 2017, AIMIM had 0.2 per cent votes in Uttar Pradesh while in 2022, it got 0.4 per cent votes.