Yogi Adityanath to kickstart campaign for Kairana Lok Sabha bypolls today

Yogi Adityanath will address a public rally in Ambehta, and elaborate security arrangements have been put in place for the event.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is slated to kickstart the campaign for the Kairana Lok Sabha elections on Tuesday. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader will address a public rally in Ambehta, and elaborate security arrangements have been put in place for the event.

A security drill was conducted ahead of Adityanath’s rally in the area on Monday. Senior police and district administration officials also visited the venue for the Chief Minister’s rally. Some ministers of the Uttar Pradesh Cabinet, BJP MLAs and senior party leaders also took stock of the preparations for the rally.

A helipad has been built at a distance of just 100 metres from the stage. The Chief Minister is expected to arrive for the rally at around 12 noon. He will be campaigning for BJP candidate Mriganka Singh.

Mriganka is the daughter of former Member of Parliament, Hukum Singh, whose death necessitated the by-elections in Kairana. The election has assumed significance as it comes shortly after BJP’s poll debacle in Adityanath’s bastion Gorakhpur and Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya’s Phulpur constituency.

Mriganka Singh contested unsuccessfully the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls in 2017 from Kairana where she was defeated by Nahid Hasan, son of former MP, the late Munawar Hasan, by over 21,000 votes.

Former MP Tabassum Hasan is the joint candidate of the opposition in the Kairana parliamentary seat. She will be contesting on the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) ticket.

Interestingly, the Rashtriya Lok Dal, which is believed to have a strong base among the farmers, has altered its election slogan for the Lok Sabha bypolls. Instead of campaigning with ‘Jai Jawan Jai Kisan’, they are using the slogan of ‘Jinnah nahi, ganna chalega (not Jinnah, it will be sugarcane this time)’. This is apparently in reference to the recent controversy over a portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).