Kairana in Uttar
Pradesh’s Shamli district is a marginal town which hardly ever made the news once.
But now, the word “exodus” has attached itself to the name of this minor polis. The
Kairana exodus is a story of tragic displacement which one set of people believe is transformative and another set, overstated. It is with these contradictions in
place that Kairana will go to polls on Thursday.

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Kairana is among
58 Assembly seats in 11 districts going to polls in the first phase of the
403-seat Uttar Pradesh Vidhan Sabha elections. It is also a constituency with a
large Muslim population, a fact of particular political significance in an
election which has seen a repeated stirring of the communal pot.

The Kairana exodus
refers to a wave of migration of Hindu families from the constituency over the
course of five years. The claims of an exodus, however, are partisan.

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While people close
to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the rest of the Sangh Parivar ecosystem,
allege an atmosphere of fear existing in the region when the Samajwadi Party
(SP) was in power, those in the SP deny claims of mass migration altogether.

From 2002 to 2014, the Kairana Assembly seat was held by Hukum Singh, the first person to claim that a mass migration of Hindus was underway in the constituency. Hukum Singh was the MLA of Kairana in 2013, when the Muzaffarnagar riots broke out. Singh named as an accused in an FIR related to the communal violence.

In 2014, Hukum Singh was elected to the Lok Sabha. He died in 2018.

After Hukum Singh left the Kairana seat in 2014, the Samajwadi Party snatched the seat from the BJP in the ensuing by-polls. Nahid Hasan won the elections.

In the
2017 Assembly elections in Kairana, Nahid Hasan of the Samajwadi Party won the
elections with 47.50% of the vote. Mriganka Singh, Hukum Singh’s daughter, came
in second with 37.33% votes. Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) took the third spot while
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) came out fourth.

This time,
the BJP is fielding Mriganka Singh again and Nahid Hasan continues to be SP’s
candidate. The BSP has pitched Rajendra Singh for the seat.  

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In 2016, the
National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) had found that more than 250 Hindu
families were forced to leave Kairana town for fear, according to a Times of
India report. On the other hand, investigative reports published by several
Indian media outlets such as The Indian Express and The Hindu, have found the
claims of an exodus “exaggerated”.

Be that as it may,
the Kairana Assembly is a critical constituency for all competing parties. Kairana
has featured in speeches of both Yogi Adityanath and Samajwadi Party chief
Akhilesh Yadav.

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During a visit to
Kairana in November last year, Adityanath had promised displaced families of
compensation if the BJP were to return to power. Akhilesh, reacting sharply to
the claim, had explicitly denied the exodus.

Uttar Pradesh goes
to polls in seven phases starting February 10. Results will be declared on
March 10.