Rampur bypoll result: Is it the end of the road for Azam Khan?

For over four decades, many appellations have been used for Mohammed Azam Khan, the controversial 74-year-old founding member of the Samajwadi Party whose writ ran large not just in his home turf of Rampur but among the Muslims of UP, particularly western, at large. His followers would variously call him a messiah, a man as devoted to his faith as he was to his motherland India, a benevolent mass leader and a fierce defender of Muslims and their constitutionally-mandated rights. For his detractors, Azam was always a hugely polarising figure, an Islamic fundamentalist, a corrupt politician, a mafia don or criminal.

What Azam never was, for fans and critics alike, was weak, helpless, despondent or defeatist. Yet, days before votes were to be cast for the Rampur assembly bypoll, when he campaigned in the constituency that he had won a record 10 times between 1980 and March 2022 but was forced to vacate this October due to his conviction in a hate speech case, Azam sounded nothing like the feisty electoral warhorse whose word carried the weight of gospel for his voters.

As he campaigned for his confidante and Samajwadi Party candidate Asim Raja, Azam sounded like a man barely clinging on to hope; bitter over the betrayal of his voters who, in the Rampur Lok Sabha bypoll earlier this year, failed to turn up at polling booths, thereby giving the BJP a victory on the seat he had vacated to return to the UP Assembly as an MLA.

An emotional Azam Khan

His emotive speech sounded more like a requiem to his long political innings. Azam broke down several times, complained angrily about being let down by his voters, exhorted his rivals to kill him because he couldn’t commit suicide as it is forbidden in Islam. He said his death would be better than the struggles of his current life and recounted how he had spent 27 months in a Sitapur prison cell that was just slightly bigger than a kabr (grave), for most part sharing it with his son, Abdullah Azam. Alluding to the BJP, he declared, “woh chahte hain ki main ediyaan ragad ragad kar mar jaoon (they want me to die a miserable death)” and said his right to vote had now been taken away and all that was left for him to face now was to be forced into exile from his country. Then, collecting himself, he pleaded for votes for Raja – “iss baar dhokha mat dena, mera dil toot jayega (don’t betray me this time, my heart will break).”

Also read: BJP wins big in UP: Defeats SP in Azam Khan’s Rampur, ahead in Akhilesh’s Azamgarh

Fewer than 10 days later, as results for the Rampur bypoll were declared, Azam had reason for his heart to be broken. Raja was defeated by the BJP’s Akash Saxena ‘Honey’ by a margin of 33,738 votes. The bypoll had witnessed an abysmal voter turnout of just 33.83 per cent; nearly 23 per cent less than the March 2022 UP assembly poll in which Azam, despite being unable to campaign due to his incarceration, had won the seat defeating Saxena by a margin of over 55,000 votes. Booth wise voter turnout showed Muslim-dominated areas witnessed extremely low polling while Hindu-dominated areas saw a higher turnout.

Raja had, in fact, complained even before voting day that SP voters were being intimidated and the areas of their residences being barricaded by the local police and administration to prevent them from voting on December 5. On December 7, a day before counting of votes, a petitioner had moved the Supreme Court alleging that the police had “stopped thousands and thousands of voters from voting” in the Rampur bypoll. The petition demanded a stay on counting of votes and urged the apex court to declare the bypoll “null and void”. Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud directed the petitioner to move for a listing of the case the following day – December 8, when votes were to be counted – but the matter hasn’t been listed till date.

Personal setback

The veracity of the claims about voter intimidation and irregularities in polling notwithstanding, it is undeniable that the outcome of the Rampur bypoll is among the biggest personal setbacks that Azam has faced in his long political career. Though he was not the candidate, the stakes in the election were, arguably, higher than in any of the polls that Azam had himself contested from Rampur since he first won the seat back in 1980.

This was not in the least because Raja was his candidate but because it was a battle for Azam’s prestige, his legacy. In more ways than one, a victory for Raja would have been akin to a referendum against Azam’s perceived persecution by the Yogi Adityanath government and against the BJP’s sustained effort to break the disenfranchised former 10-term legislator’s grip on Rampur; politically rendering him persona non grata. Clearly, this was not to be.

In Saxena’s win, the BJP managed to score the Rampur seat for the first time since 1952 but the implications of the result are far greater for Azam than for Raja or the newly elected Rampur MLA. Equally, in what preceded the bypoll vis-à-vis Azam, there is also an ominous message from the Yogi administration to other Muslim leaders – electoral heavyweights or not – of UP.

There can be no denying that Azam’s political and public life have been marked by ceaseless controversies. His brusque demeanour and gruff tenor, particularly during poll campaigns or when standing up to BJP’s Hindutva politics, have contributed to the popular perception of Azam being an arrogant leader, consumed by a sense of self-importance. His ministerial stints in previous Samajwadi Party governments too have attracted criticism of high-handedness while his growing clout – political, social and financial – within Rampur in the last four decades have added weight to the public imagining of Azam as a muscle-man with dubious dealings.

With this baggage, much of it undoubtedly the by-product of his own conduct, it is easy to paint the current spate of legal troubles visited upon the former lawmaker as merely a case of the law finally catching up with a history-sheeter. But, is it really that simple?

The turning point

To anyone who has observed Azam over the years, it is evident that his systematic undermining, not just by the ruling BJP but also his own Samajwadi Party, began only when a raging Hindutva wave swept across Uttar Pradesh in 2017, replacing the SP’s Akhilesh Yadav government with one led by the BJP’s Yogi Adityanath. Indeed, the groundwork for this wave had begun in 2014 itself when Narendra Modi switched his political base from Gujarat to UP’s Varanasi and helped the saffron party sweep 73 of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha seats.

Soon after Yogi became UP CM, a series of FIRs and court cases were slapped not just against Azam but also other members of his family, including his son and Suar MLA Abdullah Azam, his wife and former MP Tazeen Fatima, his retired school teacher sister and even his deceased mother. The frequency of cases being slapped against Azam and his family increased exponentially after Azam defeated actor-turned-politician and BJP candidate Jaya Prada in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls by a margin of over 1.10 lakh votes.

Also read: FIR lodged against Azam Khan for commenting against police, EC

Jaya Prada, a former two-term MP from Rampur, and Azam had been bitter rivals from the time they were both in the SP. She was a protégé of the late Amar Singh whom Azam had strong differences with. However, the events that followed Azam’s 2019 victory from Rampur were not about his old rivalry with Jaya Prada but the repercussions of the new political order in UP – and at the Centre – and how it viewed Azam.

Between May and October 2019, a record number of 87 criminal cases were lodged against Azam and his family members. That number is now approaching 100. Farmers who had reportedly sold their land to Azam way back in 2007 to set up his dream project, the Mohammad Ali Jauhar University in Rampur, suddenly declared that they had done so under duress. The Adityanath government promptly put Azam’s name on its official list of the state’s “Bhu-Mafia” (land sharks). Bulldozers, Yogi’s preferred symbol for a mighty government, regularly make threatening rounds of the Jauhar University, abetting fears of its imminent collapse.

In the other FIRs and court cases, Azam was variously charged for offences ranging from theft of books from a local madarsa (an Islamic seminary) for his university library to the theft of furniture and statues. He was also accused of ‘dacoity’ of buffaloes and goats. And then, there was the hate speech case that resulted in his conviction and subsequent disqualification as an MLA. Days before the Rampur bypoll, a fresh case was slapped against Azam by a woman in Rampur who claimed that a speech he made at a public rally had outraged her modesty as a woman and was tantamount to sexual harassment.

After he was released from the Sitapur jail this October, Azam had told many of his interviewers that he remained flummoxed at why the BJP repeatedly called him a “mafia” and “dreaded gangster” when most cases foisted against him were aimed at branding him a “petty criminal” who carried out “dacoities of buffaloes and goats”.

Yogi govt’s ‘vengeance’

If the Yogi government came after Azam with a vengeance, the founding member of SP was also betrayed by his own comrades. During the 27 months of his incarceration, including the time when he had been bedridden due to serious ailments after contracting COVID in prison, but was denied bail to seek treatment at a hospital, neither SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav, nor party chief Akhilesh Yadav called on Azam to enquire about his health. “Why should they come to see me; I am nobody,” Azam had told an interviewer after his release from jail. When asked if he felt hurt at old comrade Mulayam deserting him in his most difficult time, Azam said, “perhaps he felt there was truth to the allegations against me or maybe he wanted to spare himself the agony of seeing me in a helpless state”.

Akhilesh continues to avoid any suo motu statements on Azam and had largely stayed away from the Rampur Lok Sabha and Rampur assembly bypoll campaign. On the rare occasion that Akhilesh does speak about Azam, his statements are generic, almost mechanical, limiting reference to vendetta and communal politics by the BJP but lacking any warmth towards a leader who had contributed immensely to building the late Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party.

Also read: Samajwadi Party delegation meets UP governor over continued harassment of Azam Khan

Within the SP, as also in the wider opposition bloc of UP, Azam’s clashes with the law are seen as a cruel reminder of the extent to which the ruling BJP is willing to go to marginalize and dehumanize Muslim leaders of any consequence. A majority of the 33 Muslim MLAs (excluding Azam, who is no longer a legislator) who had won the March assembly polls on a SP ticket have, in the past nine months of Yogi’s new government, been slapped with multiple criminal cases starkly similar to the ones foisted against Azam. There is also a signal in this ostensible witch-hunt against Muslim lawmakers to the electorate in their constituencies – switch sides or face similar alienation.

Did this play a role in the way Rampur voted during the bypoll, is now a valid question.

As for Azam, the journey ahead looks bleak. Is it the end of the road for the political heavyweight from Rampur?