Mannavar Hasan’s father Akhtar Hasan has also been an MP from Kairana.Wajid Mansoori of Kairana says, “Tell me, can such people be organized criminals? The Hasan family has been in Congress, SP, BSP and RLD. It is just that no one from the family has joined the BJP. Everything would have been fine if they would have been washed in BJP’s washing machine. They are elected by the public by voting. It is an insult to the public to call them criminals. All the battles that the Hasan family has fought are for the public.”According to Wajid Mansuri, Nahid Hasan was jailed for opposing a move to throw downtrodden and destitute people out of their houses. “Nahid Hasan will become a MLA once again,” he said.Kairana has become a talking point because Home Minister Amit Shah spoke on the issue of migration at a rally and went around distributing pamphlets. Here, the BJP has fielded Mriganka Singh, daughter of former MP Hukum Singh.Afsar Chaudhary, a resident of Kairana, says that the election campaign by Amit Shah had enthused Nahid Hasan’s supporters. “After Shah’s campaign, it became a matter of discussion that the Home Minister himself is distributing pamphlets from door to door in Kairana to defeat Nahid Hasan. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath also made communal statements,” he says.Another resident Mohammad Wasim says that the result of Kairana assembly seat has already been decided by the public. “People have sympathy for Nahid Hasan. He is in jail and his sister Iqra Hassan is on the threshold of creating history,” he says.Iqra Hassan is the daughter of late Chaudhry Mannavar Hasan. She has emerged as the savior of her family, beset with legal tangles.Sameen Zaidi of Kairana says that Iqra Hasan was an educated woman who was earlier living in London. “She is a mixture of simplicity and modernity. She understands politics very well. She is very popular. The sympathy of the entire Kairana has shifted towards Iqra. It is common knowledge here that a single woman is battling the system to save her brother and mother. We should be with her. Iqra is the next generation of her family politics. Her name is on every tongue,” he says.The Kairana assembly seat has 49 percent Muslims, while there are more than 20,000 Jats. The Jat community has earlier helped Nahid Hassan’s mother Tabbusam Hassan to become an MP on a RLD ticket.Pappu Chaudhary of Jat-dominated Una clarifies that there is no confusion in his society and it has adopted Iqra Hasan. “Now she is our daughter. There is no confusion. Kairana’s victory will write history,” he says.The number of Jats in Thana Bhawan, the third assembly seat in Shamli district is around 60,000, while the number of Muslims is 1,15,000. Sugarcane Minister of Uttar Pradesh Suresh Rana is MLA from here. In the 2017 elections, he had defeated BSP’s Rao Waris by a close margin.
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