Crisis of truth & lies in UP’s Kairana

When the revered Ganga & Yamuna flow down the plains, tired, humans pray for the rivers' quiet detour. In fertile western Uttar Pradesh, the rivers deposit a creed with those who care to value life: keep faith in the flow irrespective of caste or religion. That's why Tyagis, Maliks, Ranas, Chowdharis and many more belong to which religion is difficult to tell in those plains. Muzaffarnagar was such a melting pot, so was its underbelly, Kairana.

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But then political culture seeped in, cleverly giving a standalone identity to the residents. So, you hear stories of communal riots and mischievous caste calculations a year ahead of UP Assembly polls. The latest story is about "exodus" of Hindus from Kairana, a place that boasted of lending its name to the famous classical Indian music 'gharana'producing stalwarts such as Ustad Abdul Karim Khan.

Visit a railway station or a bus stand in Muzzaffarnagar, Shamli or Kairana in the morning on weekdays, you would find hundreds of people leaving for work in Panipat, just about 30km, in Haryana. They are mostly handloom and powerloom workers who don't have jobs in their towns. And if left to them, they wouldn't ever like to return.

Till 2011 Kairana was a tehsil of Muzaffarnagar district. It became part of the newly carved district of Shamli in 2011.This is the areas that saw defiance against the establishment in the 80s and 90s. Nobody paid taxes then. Policemen and government officials avoided posting there.

The basics

As per the 2011 census, the Kairana Nagar Palika Parishad has a population of 89,000 of which 80.74% are Muslims and 18.34% Hindus. The fact that Kairana MP Hukum Singh has represented Muslim-majority Kairana assembly constituency for a record seven times, was cabinet minister twice and won the 2014 Lok Sabha polls speaks volumes about the place and its people.

The sequence of events explains much about why Kairana is being hyped.

Days before the June 12-13 BJP national executive in Allahabad, a Congressman-turned BJP politician 78-year old Hukum Singh released a first list of 346 names titled 'Kairana se palayan karne wale Hindu pariwaron ki soochi' (list of Hindu families who migrated from Kairana) which catapulted him in the national media. Barely a fortnight ago during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Saharanpur rally on May 26, the senior western UP politician was seen seated in the third row.

The defeat of the BJP's second candidate in the UP Vidhan Parishad election on June 10 and BJP-sponsored independent candidate for Rajya Sabha Preeti Mahapatra on June 11 cast its dark shadow on the BJP national executive in the Hindi heartland of Allahabad where the party was to launch its 2017 Mission UP, aiming at 265-plus in the 403-seat Assembly.

Party politics

There's yet another twist: The Jat factor. The community sprinkled across western UP is up against the ruling BJP in neighbouring Haryana. The BJP is in no position to take them for granted. Can Kairana polarise the society to BJP's advantage in the Muslim-Jat belt?

The BJP has chiefly two powerful adversaries in UP, the ruling Samajwadi Party and Mayawati's BSP with both having support base among Muslims and backward castes. The BJP has done its homework. In the last about a decade, most BJPs district chiefs in UP belonged to forward caste (Brahmin or Thakur). Today, out of the latest list of 94 district presidents, 44 belong to backward or extremely backward castes. UP also has 35%vote of Yadav, Jatav and Muslim combine.

The selection of Keshav Prasad Maurya as president of the party's UP unit is a part of the attempt to create a grand alliance of OBC and MBC castes.

Lies, more lies

Back to Kairana: the BJP filed a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission on June 10 following which the Commission issued a notice to the state government about 250 families leaving their homes in Kairana area fearing criminals.

The complainant mentions three specific criminal cases as the cause for the exodus: In the immediate case of June 10, 2016 two accused are already behind bars. The second case is two years old and the third almost ten years old in which all accused have been in jail for years, says Shamli Superintendent of Police Vijay Bhushan.

Askari Naqvi a human rights lawyer following the Muzaffarnagar riot cases points out that the real exodus has happened in the riot-hit villages of Muzaffarnager like Phugana and Kutba-Kutbi where not a single Muslim family now lives in the village.

The real reason for families moving out of Kairana is not any different from the rest of India — shrinking employment opportunities. However, the Kairana episode is fast boomeranging. Hukum Singh has admitted that there were mistakes made by his party workers. Then he took a U-turn by claiming that the migrations were not communal but due to crime.

The emerging contradictions are entangling the BJP in fact and fiction, causing it embarrassment and possibly ensuring the end of the road for its sitting MP, Hukum Singh.