Lok Sabha elections: Will RLD tie-up help BJP retain Muzaffarnagar?

The 2019 Lok Sabha (LS) elections in Muzaffarnagar is remembered for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) Sanjeev Kumar Balyan scraping past Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) chief, the late, Ajit Singh, by just 6,526 votes.

In the March 2022 Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP lost three of the five Assembly seats that fall in the Muzaffarnagar LS constituency to the Samajwadi Party-RLD alliance, and losing another in a by-poll later, which was sufficient reason for it to get the RLD, now headed by Jayant Chaudhary, within the fold of the National Democratic Alliance. Awarding Bharat Ratna to his grandfather, Chaudhary Charan Singh, a former prime minister and one of the tallest farmer leaders of independent India, among other factors, persuaded Jayant to ally with the BJP.

The communal riots in Muzaffarnagar in 2013 were a crucial factor in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. The riots fractured the Jat-Muslim social entente that Charan Singh had shaped in the 1960s and contributed to the religious polarisation in the region.

But the LS contests in Muzaffarnagar are also remembered for the dominance of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in the region. It won the seat in 1967, and in 1971, its candidate, Vijay Pal Singh, defeated Charan Singh, who was the candidate of the Bharatiya Kranti Dal and who by then had served two brief stints as the chief minister. The CPI had an alliance with the Congress. In 1989, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, later to serve as India’s home minister and Jammu and Kashmir CM, won the seat on a Janata Dal ticket.

For 2024, Balyan would expect an easier contest than five years back when the RLD, SP, and Bahujan Samaj Party had an alliance. He will defend the seat that he won in 2014 and 2019 in a three-cornered contest, with the SP fielding Harendra Mallik.