Ram is for Hindus and Ali is for Muslims, it is said. However, in the Rampur and Aligarh assembly seats of Uttar Pradesh, that is not the case. Going against popular belief, the Rampur has only elected Muslim MLAs since the first assembly polls while Aligarh has picked Hindu leaders more than half of the times, official data analysed by CNN-News18 shows.
As per the Election Commission information studied, Rampur has chosen Muslim leaders since the first UP assembly polls in 1951-52, while Aligarh, which had its first assembly election in 1957, has voted in a Hindu leader 10 out of 17 times since.
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Not just assembly polls, but in the Lok Sabha elections too they have voted contrary to popular belief. Of the total 17 general elections since Independence, Rampur, an erstwhile princely state ruled by a Nawab, has picked three Hindu MPs – Rajendra Kumar Sharma (two terms), Jaya Prada, and Nepal Singh. Aligarh, on the other hand, has elected only one Muslim since 1952 – Congress’s Jamal Khwaja won in 1957. Barring him, the seat always went to a Hindu leader.
In Rampur, Azam Khan, who was also a Samajwadi Party candidate in the recent elections, has been preferred by the electorate 10 out of 17 times, including this one. Barring the 1996 polls, he was picked non-stop between 1980 and 2022. In 1996, the election was won by Congress leader Afroz Ali Khan. That year, Azam Khan was the runner-up, losing by 13,906 votes. Since 2019, he was a member of Lok Sabha from the Rampur seat while his wife was the MLA. In this election, he won the seat after securing 1,21,755 votes, while BJP’s Akash Saxena was a distant second with 56,368 votes.
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In the Aligarh assembly seat, the first elected MLA was Anant Ram Verma in 1957. Apart from him, the other Hindus who have represented the constituency are IP Singh (elected in 1967 and 1974), Baldev Singh (1985), Krishna Kumar Navman (in 1989, 1991, and 1993), Vivek Bansal (2002), and Sanjeev Raja (2017). Navman holds the record of being elected from the seat thrice. This time, Sanjeev Raja’s wife Mukta Raja won the polls as she bagged 1,20,389 votes.
Aligarh voted in the first round of the seven-phase UP elections on February 10 while Rampur was in the second phase on February 14. The results were declared on Thursday. The BJP swept the polls with 255 seats and over 41 per cent votes while the SP was second with 111 seats and 32 per cent vote share.
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