Road to Manglaur seat seems difficult for BJP’s outsider candidate

ROORKEE: BJP has fielded three-time MLA Kartar Singh Bhadana from the Manglaur assembly seat for the July 10 bypoll banking on Gujjar voters supporting their community’s candidate but political observers believe that victory might elude the saffron party again due to the caste dynamics dominating the constituency.
BJP has never won from this constituency which has always been represented either by Congress or BSP due to higher percentage of Muslim and Dalit voters.
Manglaur covers two dozen villages, comprising 65,000 Muslim and 18,000 Dalit voters. Besides it, around 6,500 and 10,000 voters are respectively from Gujjar and Jat communities.
Bhadana, 69, is a parachute candidate with no ties to the Manglaur constituency. He represented the Samalkha assembly constituency in Haryana from 1996 to 2004 and also served as a cooperative minister. Around that time, he garnered attention for his role in the ‘Gujjar Andolan’ during which the community demanded ST category status. In 2012, he contested from the Khatauli assembly seat in UP on an RLD ticket and won, securing 46,722 votes. Later in 2014, he contested Lok Sabha elections from the Kairana seat but was defeated. In the 2022 UP assembly polls, he contested on a BSP ticket from Khatauli but was defeated again.
BJP claims that in Bhadana the party had found a leader who is focused on development, unlike the previous MLAs from Congress and BSP who never carried out any work in Manglaur and instead fulfilled their own interests.
On Bhadana’s outsider status, BJP district head Shobha Ram Prajapati said, “We are confident that he will emerge victorious as the people are fed up with both Congress and BSP. In our view, Bhadana is not an outsider to the state. He has been in touch with the locals for over 20 years.”
Against Bhadana, Congress has fielded Qazi Mohammad Nizamuddin, who lost to BSP’s Sarwat Karim Ansari by only 598 votes during the previous assembly poll. Meanwhile, BSP has nominated Obedur Rehman, the son of Ansari who died in Oct last year.
According to analysts, BJP has always come in third in the constituency, which has 1,19,930 voters, as the competition has always been between Qazi Mohammad Nizamuddin and Sarwat Karim Ansari (also referred to as Haji). This led to a commonly asked question during polls “Qazi ya Haji”.
In the 2022 assembly elections, BJP had fielded Dinesh Panwar, a local Gujjar who was an IIT-Roorkee graduate and the son of a former Manglaur BJP legislator. At that time as well, BJP finished third, receiving 18,763 votes out of the 87,845 votes cast in the constituency.
As Muslim voters form a big chunk of the electorate, Muslim candidates can win easily if they get support from Gujjar or Jat voters. However, Jat and Gujjar voters are believed to be at odds with each other.
“As long-time BSP voters are starting to support Congress, the candidate of the grand old party has an edge this time. The winner would be the person who gets over 32,000 votes in the fray,” said Jitendra Panwar Delna, an amateur psephologist.