Lal Singh’s red flag for journalists

Journalists protest against the J-K government. PTI file

BRP BhaskarThe Tribune

Threats come dime a dozen these days. They make headlines, provoke social media outburst and then, in most cases, die down. But Kashmir has been a trouble-spot since long and appears to be at the beginning of a difficult phase. So BJP leader Chaudhary Lal Singh's warning to journalists in the valley, with an ominous allusion to the murder of Shujaat Bukhari, Editor of Rising Kashmir, merits attention in a wider context.

Lal Singh was one of two BJP ministers who attempted to block the filing of charge-sheet against the men the state police had nabbed in connection with the Kathua rape and murder case. Chief Minister Mehmooda Mufti got the BJP to replace the two ministers but the ministry did not survive long after that.

Journalism in Kashmir was never quite like what it was elsewhere in the country.  

First, there was the Pakistani attempt to grab the state using a hastily mobilised tribal force. If the tribesmen had not tarried on the way to loot and rape, they could have taken Srinagar before the Maharaja signed the instrument of accession and India flew in troops. Then, there was the dismissal and arrest of Prime Minister Sheikh Abdullah to foil a suspected unilateral declaration of independence. For 22 years thereafter, India ensured a friendly government in the state by keeping him out of the election arena.

All this created a situation which cast on journalists the onerous responsibility of safeguarding the national interest. By and large, they gave no cause for offence. When they did, they were subtly reminded they were off-course. One journalist sent by a national daily, on returning home from an outing, found the place bare: the furniture and all his belongings were gone. He took the message and went back to Delhi. 

National interest flew into my face when I landed there in 1973, exiled by my news agency. Chief Minister Syed Mir Qasim felt I had overlooked national interest in reporting protests in Ladakh, including a hartal in Leh, when he visited the region. A minister from Jammu felt I had overlooked his interest in reporting his son's arrest on a rape complaint filed by a foreigner. "You are the instrumentality through which I am being destroyed," he told me.

When the government moved to Jammu, I stayed back in Srinagar to experience the Kashmir winter. On a visit to Jammu, I called on the CM. He said he was sorry to hear of the burglary in my house. I told him there was no burglary until I left Srinagar.

The burglars came later, after I returned to Srinagar. They waited for me in the unlit house till I got back at night. I heard the sound of intruders moving in the house. I reckoned it was better to face them than risk being waylaid in a deserted street on a winter night.  The bravado earned me head injuries which required 11 stitches. Their brief apparently was to wound, not kill.   

Sheikh Abdullah once asked me: "Foreign correspondents come to meet me. I talk to them. They write a short report. What they write is what I said. Indian correspondents come to see me. I talk to them. They write long reports. What they write is not what I said. Why?" I told him: "I can think of two reasons. One, they don't understand you. Two, they understand you but they believe it is not in the country's interest. The problem is one of professional weakness and the solution is to strengthen professionalism."

A year and a half later, Abdullah was back, as CM. There was a relaxed atmosphere in Kashmir. Pakistan was unhappy. Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto called for a hartal in Kashmir the day the Sheikh came to the valley.  The Chief Secretary flew to Srinagar and reminded journalists of their duty to uphold national interest.

Based on official accounts, we reported that Kashmiris had rejected Bhutto's call. But some of us did mention the closure of shops. A local Urdu newspaper provided its own account, with photographs of closed shops and deserted streets. When Pakistan TV got the paper three days later, it displayed it on the screen to convince its viewers that there was indeed a hartal.

Sheikh Abdullah criticised us for not telling the truth. Was Gandhiji's India to be built on falsehood, he asked.

Four months later came the Emergency, the censorship and the crawling.  The valley was quiet and experiencing a level of freedom it had not known before. At the CM’s request, Mrs Gandhi transferred the power of censorship to the state government. 

One morning, his censor told us not to report a speech Awami Action Committee Chairman Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq was to deliver at the Jama Masjid that day. It was a legally untenable order as it was issued without knowing the speech content. The Mirwaiz criticised the Emergency but welcomed the PM's 20-point programme. The Emergency regime's main mouthpiece, All India Radio, picked up my report, omitted the first part and headlined the second.  The censor ignored my defiance of his order.

When we sought his intervention in the case of a Kashmiri journalist whom Haryana CM Bansi Lal had detained, the Sheikh got the detenu shifted to a Kashmir jail and then got him released on parole.  

Abdullah later inducted Mohammad Sayeed Malik, a journalist, as Director of Information, and he became the Chief Censor too. Thanks to his  intimate knowledge of the problems of the reporters, the censorship phase passed uneventfully thereafter.

Militancy set in a few years after I left Kashmir.  From my safe perch, I have been following with interest the work of Kashmiri journalists who are walking the razor's edge. English newspapers and websites have come up in Kashmir during this period, and I have admiration for the skill with which they negotiate the minefield, carrying the burden of the multiple interests they have to be watchful of. 

When Shujaat Bukhari was killed, Mohammad Sayeed Malik wrote: "Over the past about three decades Kashmiris have developed sufficient sense and acquired sufficient 'experience' to make their own intelligent guess about both the hand behind the trigger and the motive of its dastardly act. In nine out of ten cases, their instinctive guess is right though they rarely risk sharing it publicly. Bukhari's case falls into that rare category where the precise determination of the killer as well as the motive can only be guessed vaguely, not determined with certainty."  

Lal Singh's threat, if it is a serious one, adds one more to the interests journalists in Kashmir have to keep in mind while pursuing the profession in this perilous period. -- The Trubune. June 27, 2018.

Kashmir on the edge

BRP Bhaskar Exclusive to The Gulf Today Jammu and Kashmir has just been through a cataclysmic week. The chain of events began with the Bharatiya Janata Party pulling down the state’s two-year-old coalition government in which it was the Peoples Democratic Party’s junior partner. The state then came under Governor’s rule and the security forces announced withdrawal of its unilateral Ramadan ceasefire. Thus the stage was set for full-scale ‘cordon and search’ and ‘search and destroy’ operations by the security forces. Militants did not honour the Ramadan truce but there was a perceptible drop in violence during the holy month. The situation took a turn for the worse with the killing of Shujaat Bukhari, Editor of Rising Kashmir, a highly respected journalist who had been striving to promote peace, by three gunmen in Srinagar on June 14. A public protest against the murder paralysed the valley. The government responded by placing separatist leaders Syed Ali Shah Jeelani, Mirwaiz Omar Farooq and Yaseen Malik under detention or house arrest. The PDP-BJP alliance was one which should not have come about because it was doomed to fail. But the results of the Assembly elections of 2014 left few options. In the 87-member house, the PDP won 28 seats, most of them from the Kashmir valley, and the BJP 25, all from Jammu province. In the agenda for alliance hammered out by the two parties the BJP, which had been opposing J&K’s special status under Article 370 of the Constitution, agreed to maintenance of the existing position. Taking into account the PDP’s demand for withdrawal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives security personnel impunity, it also agreed to examine the possibility of de-notifying disturbed areas. Above all, the BJP committed itself to the idea of sustained dialogue with all stakeholders, including the Hurriyat Conference, to build a broad-based consensus on resolution of all outstanding issues. The agenda was merely a device to facilitate sharing of power. For the BJP it gave the opportunity to be a part of the government in the Muslim-majority state for the first time. No attempt was made to implement it. There was no immediate cause for the two parties to part ways. When the BJP summoned its ministers to Delhi they thought they were being called to discuss preparations for next year’s Lok Sabha elections. Ram Madhav, BJP General Secretary in charge of J&K affairs, informed them of the decision to pull out of the government. He told the media that the BJP was withdrawing from the government as terrorism, violence and radicalisation were on the rise and it would be apt to hand over the administration to the Governor. While there was a spurt in civilian violence in the valley in the recent past, in the form of stone-pelting by youngsters, the overall picture emerging from official statistics was one of casualty figures of security personnel falling and those of militants and civilians rising. It is disingenuous to blame Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and the state government for any deterioratuion in the security situation since central forces are the main instruments of law and order in the state. There is much speculation on what prompted the BJP to wreck the alliance at this stage. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s critics believe it was done with an eye to the Lok Sabha elections. Yashwant Sinha, a former BJP leader and bitter Modi critic, said the party would use the Kashmir issue to accentuate communalism and polarisation ahead of the elections. An outburst by former BJP minister Lal Singh suggests that the way the state police foiled the concerted effort by the party to save the accused in the case relating to rape and murder of a minor girl in Kathua may have also influenced the decision. He accused the Kashmir journalists of creating a wrong narrative and ominously reminded them of the expereince of Shujaat Bukhari. Security forces gunned down Dawood Ahmed Safali, said to be chief of “Islamic State of Jammu and Kashmir”, and three others on Friday at Nowshera in south Kashmir in the first action against militants after the imposition of Governor’s rile. Media reports quoted security establishment sources as saying they had prepared a hit list of 21 “top terrorists”. Experience does not justify the assumption that a more muscular policy will yield better results. The problem in Kashmir is a political one and a lasting solution can be found only through the political process. Cynical pursuit of an erroneous course in the hope of short-term political gains can have deleterious consequences in the long run. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, June 26, 2018.

A strange political struggle

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

A colonial building in Delhi has been for more than a week the scene of an unusual power struggle between two constitutional authorities, the government of India and the government of Delhi, which in popular parlance is a state but is actually a union territory. 

It was in this building that the highest colonial officer of Delhi lived before the British Indian government moved  from Kolkata to  New Delhi, built by Edwin Lutyens. It is now Raj Niwas, official residence of Delhi’s Lieutenant-Governor, Anil Baijal.

On June 11, Delhi Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal, went to Raj Niwas with Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and Ministers Satyendra Jain and Gopal Rai. Since then they have been camping in a waiting room there in what is described as a sit-in to press for the rights of the people of Delhi. Sisodia and Jain are also on fast. 

Baijal met Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who has direct responsibility for Delhi affairs, but neither of them has made any move so far to put an end to the sit-in. If the condition of the fasting ministers deteriorates, urgent intervention may become necessary.

The Raj Niwas developments perhaps have no parallel in the annals of democratic societies. But extra-constitutional activities are not new to India.

What is on is a political battle. Kejriwal is agitating against the Central government’s attitude which hinders his administration from giving effect to some policy decisions it has taken in the interest of the people.  

Delhi is one of seven Union Territories, whose administrations are amenable to Central control through the Lt-Governor, even if they have elected Assemblies. A constitutional amendment of 1991 made certain special provisions for the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, but did not change its status.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party made a clean sweep of all seven seats of NCT. However, in the following year’s Assembly elections, Kejriwal’s Aam Admi Party took 67 of the 70 seats, leaving BJP with a paltry three.

Modi has still not forgotten that humiliating experience. Kejriwal had a running battle with Lt-Governor Najeeb Jung, who, he believed, was putting obstacles in his way at the Centre’s instance.

When Najeeb Jung, a former civil servant, hung up his boots Modi picked for the post Baijal, another former bureaucrat who had been associated with the pro-BJP think tank Vivekananda International Foundation since retirement. And the battle between the two constitutional functionaries continued.   

Kejriwal is a civil servant who quit the job to do public service through a non-government organisation. After taking an active part in the anti-corruption movement, he broke away to launch the AAP. Its stunning victory in Delhi raised hopes of its becoming a major national player but they did not materialise.

The AAP government’s work has produced good results in the fields of education and health and won praise nationally and internationally. After a fight with big producers, it drastically reduced electricity tariff. It also extended water supply to several hundred localities where the poor live.

Speaking at the government’s third anniversary in February Kejriwal said the Central Vigilance Commission had reported an 81 per cent reduction in corruption in the NCT in three years. He accused the Centre of using the Lt-Governor to stall his government’s legislative initiatives.

Recently Central investigators raided Kejriwal’s office and questioned him as part of a probe into an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash while attending a meeting there. The immediate provocation for Kejriwal’s sit-in was  a tiff with Indian Administrative Service officials following that incident. In a letter to Modi, he sought his help to end the ‘strike’ by the officials.

The IAS Officers’ Association denied its members are on strike and released photographs showing them at work in their offices. The Kejriwal protest has become a new issue on which opposition parties can combine against Modi. Almost all opposition parties except the Congress is backing him.

Four Chief Ministers, West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee (Trinamool Congress), Andhra Pradesh’s Nara Chandrababu Naidu (Telugu Desam), Karnataka’s HD Kumaraswamy (Janata Dal-Secular) and Kerala’s Pinarayi Vijayan (Communist Party of India-Marxist), who were in New Delhi  for a meeting called by the Centre planned a solidarity visit to Kejriwal.  Baijal denied them permission to visit Raj Niwas,  Later they conveyed their views  to Modi. He did not respond. 

Modi cannot pretend that the matter does not concern him. .He has to intervene and resolve the issue in the interests of smooth working of the democratic system. --Gulf Tiday, Sharjah, June 19, 2018.

Opposition Coming Together in UP Could Be the Game Changer in 2019

Recent by-election results show that even in constituencies where BJP polled more than 50% of the votes in 2014, it may not be in a position to withstand a combined opposition assault.

B.R.P Bhaskar

The Wire

The most hopeful sign for the opposition as they prepare for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections is the maturity and wisdom displayed by Bahujan Samajwadi Party’s Mayawati and Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, who were the main rivals for power in Uttar Pradesh until the BJP staged a comeback in the state.

The BSP had won a majority in the state assembly in 2007, leading to Mayawati becoming the chief minister for the fourth time. In 2012, the SP secured a majority and Akhilesh became the chief minister. His father, Mulayam Singh Yadav, had held the post thrice earlier. Last year, probably riding what was left of the Modi wave, BJP obtained a majority and after a 15-year gap, Uttar Pradesh has a BJP chief minister in Adityanath.

The state with the most seats in parliament, UP made the biggest contribution to Narendra Modi’s win by giving the BJP 71 of its 80 seats and another two to its ally, Apna Dal. The party benefitted immensely from the SP-BJP rivalry. Its vote share of 42.63% was just a wee bit above the combined poll of SP and BSP, which was 42.13%.

With its 22.36% vote share, SP got five seats. The Congress, which polled 7.53% votes, won two seats – those of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. BSP had a vote share of 19.77% but it did not get any seats. It became the only recognised national party to draw a blank. This experience appears to have prompted Mayawati, who as a rule has stayed out of alliances, to re-think her party’s strategy.

BJP and its ally won 20 seats with less than 40% of the votes polled and 37 with between 40-50% of the votes. Several of the 16 seats it won with more than 50% 0f the votes were those of star candidates like Modi, Murli Manohar Joshi, Rajnath Singh, Adityanath, Maneka Gandhi and actor Hema Malini. Some others were from places in and around Muzaffarnagar where there was organised violence aimed at communal polarisation.

The opposition’s by-election successes in Gorakhpur and Kairana, which were among these 16, show that even in constituencies where BJP polled more than 50% of the votes in 2014, it may not be in a position to withstand a combined opposition assault.

Opposition unity in the by-elections was easy to achieve as BSP, which did not enter the contest, extended support to SP in Gorakhpur and Phulpur and to Rashtriya Lok Dal in Kairana.

From the time BSP was formed, it began putting up candidates on a large scale all over the country. In the initial phase, it was able to make a mark in a few northern seats. Later its influence shrank to UP, but it continued fielding candidates across the country. Although the bulk of its candidates forfeited their deposits, it gained recognition as a national party in terms of the norms prescribed by the Election Commission.

Apart from some symbolic acts, there has so far been no concrete step to forge opposition unity ahead of the 2019 elections. Some regional parties have been talking of a Federal Front. The Congress is said to have already come to an understanding with the Janata Dal (Secular), its coalition partner in Karnataka. A lot of work remains to be done at national and state levels to put in place a united opposition capable of taking on BJP and its allies.

Mayawati. Credit: PTI

Seat sharing will not become a problem if the parties approach the issue rationally. A rule of thumb could be to treat the 2014 vote share as the basis for allocation of seats. If the subsequent by-election or assembly election results indicate a significant improvement in the strength of a party, it can seek a change in the formula and the matter can be settled through negotiations.

In UP, SP was ahead of BSP in the Lok Sabha elections. But in the assembly poll, BSP, with 22.23% votes, was slightly better placed than SP, with only 21.82% votes. Whichever way one looks at it, they are equal forces with a common interest – keeping the BJP at bay, whose ideology is inimical to the interests of the social and economic groups who constitute their support base.

As parties which grew in opposition to the Congress, SP and BSP have a long anti-Congress tradition. However, at the moment, there is a concurrence of interests since all three agree that the constitutional principles of democracy and secularism are under threat and they must safeguard them at any cost.

The significance of the Congress outreach to Mayawati cannot be underestimated for a united opposition to take on the saffron party in 2019. Credit: PTI

A fair formula for seat-sharing in UP will be for the opposition parties to keep those that they hold in the present house and to allot the other seats to the parties which were runners-up in the last elections.

Under the first part of this formula, SP will get the seven seats it now holds (including two won in by-elections), the Congress the two it won last time and the Rashtriya Lok Dal the one it snatched from BJP in a recent by-election. Under the second part, BSP will get 33 seats in which it was BJP’s closest rival, SP 30, Congress six and RLD one. Thus BSP gets 33, SP 37, Congress eight and RLD two

File photo of Akhilesh Yadav. Credit: Reuters

This is not suggested as an inflexible formula. It can be seen as a basic framework which can be modified suitably through negotiations.

The Congress may seek a larger share of seats this time. Both BSP and SP are parties which have been trying to make a mark in other states. It may not be a bad idea for them to accommodate the Congress’s wishes in UP in exchange for its support for their candidates in other states.

Mayawati’s alliance with H.D. Kumaraswamy’s JD(S) in the Karnataka elections enabled BSP to get its first MLA in a southern state, one who is a minister in the state’s coalition government. This is a breakthrough for the BSP and should encourage Mayawati to look for more such opportunities elsewhere.

SP, BSP, Congress and RLD had a combined vote share of more than 50% in both the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and 2017 assembly elections. It will be possible to severely restrict BJP’s strength in the new Lok Sabha and optimise their own position if BSP and SP can settle for 33 or 34 seats each and accommodate Congress and RLD in the rest. (June 16, 2018)

Banking sector's worrisome woes continue

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

India’s largest public and private sector banks are grappling with problems arising from systemic weaknesses and their unhealthy consequences.

The State Bank of India, with a customer base of 420 million and balance-sheet of more than Rs 30,000 billion, is the only bank from the country among the world’s top 50. It reported a net loss of Rs 65.47 billion for the financial year that ended on March 31 as against a net profit of Rs 104.84 billion in the previous financial year.

It attributed the loss to “an increase in provisions for non-performing assets (NPAs) and mark-to-market investment portfolio”. In plain language, this means the bank had to take into account possibilities of non-recovery of some loans and fall in market value of securities.

NPAs, always a source of worry, have become a cause for increased concern in view of the ease with which high-profile borrowers like playboy-businessman Vijay Mallya and diamond merchants Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi have been able to slip out of the country.

Of the 21 state-owned banks, 19 were in the red when the last financial year closed. Their total loss was about Rs 873.57 billion.

The Punjab National Bank, which is at the centre of the Nirav Modi-Choksi scam topped the list with a loss of Rs 122.83 billion, followed by IDBI Bank with Rs 82.38 billion. SBI was in the third place.

At the end of 2017, the gross NPAs of all banks stood at a whopping Rs 8,409.58 billion. Industrial loans accounted for Rs 6,092.22 billion in NPAs, the services sector for Rs 1,105.20 billion and the agricultural sector for Rs 696 billion.

According to information provided to Parliament, the industrial sector led in delinquency with 20.41 per cent of the advances turning into NPAs, as against the agricultural sector’s 6.53 per cent and the service sector’s 5.77 per cent.

SBI, the largest bank, has the highest NPA figure of Rs 2,015.60 billion, and is followed by the Punjab National Bank with Rs 552 billion and IDBI Bank with Rs 445.42 billion. 

Among private sector banks, the ICICI Bank has the most NPAs: Rs 338.49 billion. A large loan it gave to Videocon Industries, a home-grown consumer durables company, is now under investigation for suspected quid pro quo as that company pumped money into NuPower Renewables, a firm owned by Deepak Kochar, husband of ICICI Bank CEO Chanda Kochar.

Videocon, which was once a highly profitable company, filed an insolvency petition before the National Company Law Tribunal last week. It owes about Rs 200 billion to a consortium led by SBI.

The steady rise in the growth of NPAs over the years raises the question whether the Reserve Bank of India has been diligent in the performance of its role as the central bank. 

Last February, while going through SBI’s documents relating to the financial year ending March 31, 2017, RBI found that it had understated its NPAs by 21 per cent and overstated its profits by 36 per cent. The standard RBI practice is to publicly report the divergence if it exceeds prescribed limits, which are quite liberal, with a view to naming and shaming the bank. No one is punished for misleading the regulator and the general public.

In April, RBI reportedly put 11 state-owned banks under its prompt corrective action framework which entails restriction on their lending activities.

Three days ago Piyush Goyal, who is officiating as Finance Minister, announced the setting up of a committee with instructions to submit recommendations for the formation of an asset reconstruction company for quick resolution of stressed bank accounts in a transparent manner.

When gross irregularities are investigated, bank officials get caught and are charged with corruption. But bankers do not always bend the rules for personal gain. Sometimes they do so at the behest of politicians who want to help their financiers.

Former RBI Governor YV Reddy has said that the government is pressing banks to lend to infrastructure projects, which are not an area in which they have competence, and to make depositors share the burden of bank frauds. 

A lasting solution to the banks’ woes cannot be found until the political overlords learn to respect the professional judgment of bankers.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, June 12, 2018

What by-poll figures foretell

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

 

The Lok Sabha elections due in less than a year will not be a cakewalk for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, as their loyal followers imagined in the wake of the vast expansion of the party’s footprint across the country in the last four years.

When Modi led the BJP to power in 2014, winning 282 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha, it ruled only in seven states. The Congress was in power in 13 states. The BJP now rules over 21 states either on its own or in alliance with other parties. The Congress is in power in just four.

The BJP did not secure power in all the states on the strength of its electoral performance. It got control over several states through post-poll alliances. In Goa and Manipur, it seized power by outmanoeuvering the Congress, which had won more seats, with the help of Governors the Modi government had appointed. 

With 21 seats the Congress emerged as the largest party in the 60-member Meghalaya Assembly in the elections early this year. The BJP which contested 47 seats won only two. Yet it is part of the ruling dispensation as a partner of the coalition headed by the regional National People’s Party, the second largest party with 19 seats. 

The BJP did run into some stumbling blocks. It had won all seven Lok Sabha seats from Delhi State in 2014. However, in the following year the fledgling Aam Aami Party (AAP) inflicted a humiliating defeat on it and grabbed 67 of the state’s 70 Assembly seats, leaving it with just three. 

Last year, in Punjab the Congress ousted the Akali Dal-BJP coalition which had been in power for 10 years. The AAP became the main opposition with 20 seats in the 117-member Assembly. The Akali Dal ended up with only 15 seats and the BJP with three. 

This year the BJP registered a big win in Tripura, where it seized power, putting an end to 25 years of unbroken rule by the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

If the BJP’s fortune was a mixed one, with more good than bad thus far, it took a turn for the worse thereafter. Close on the heels of the debacle in Karnataka, where long-time rivals Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) joined hands and blocked its way to power, it suffered a string of by-election defeats.

Four Lok Sabha seats and 10 Assembly seats figured in the by-poll calendar. With the ruling coalition and the opposition winning two Lok Sabha sears each they may be said to have shared the honours but the wresting of the Kairana seat in UP from the BJP by a candidate backed by several opposition parties holds much significance. 

Kairana is close to Muzzafarnagar, which was a scene of violence, believed to have been engineered by Hindutva elements to precipitate polarisation on religious lines, ahead of the 2014 elections. The by-election was necessitated by the death of Hukum Singh of the BJP and the party fielded his daughter, Mriganka Singh, in the hope that a sympathy wave will carry her to victory. 

The Rashtriya Lok Dal, a regional party, put up Tabassun Hasan, wife of Munawar Hasan, who had served as a member of the UP Assembly and the two houses of Parliament before his death in a road accident in 2004. The Samajwadi Party, the Bhaujan Samaj Party and the Congress extended support to her. 

Kairana is the third Lok Sabha seat from UP which the BJP has lost in three months, the other two being Gorakhpur and Phulpur, which were vacated by Yogi Adityanath and Dinesh Sharma to become Chief Minister and Deputy Chief Minister respectively.

The three by-election results have demonstrated convincingly that a united opposition can hold the BJP at bay even in UP, where it had swept the polls in the last Lok Sabha and Assembly elections.

Assembly elections are due later this year in Rajasthan, Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. The BJP and the Congress are the main contenders for power in all three. The Congress has stated that it is in talks for a tie-up with BSP, which draws support mainly from the Dalits.

The opposition’s unity efforts are in the preliminary stage and will take time to materialise. As the party in power, the BJP can, if it so wishes, advance the date of the poll. There is a possibility of the party exercising the option in order to deny the opposition parties time to come together. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, June 5, 2018