All eyes will be on the bypoll result of Rampur assembly constituency from where the Samajwadi Party fielded its Lok Sabha member Mohammad Azam Khan’s wife Tazeen Fatma to retain the seat.
Ever since the first assembly election in 1952, only a Muslim candidate has won from this seat.
The Rampur seat witnessed a four-cornered contest this time with Congress and Bahujan Samaj Party fielding Muslim candidates and the Bharatiya Janata Party fielding Bharat Bhushan Gupta in hope of consolidating Hindu votes.
The Congress, SP and BSP candidates may have caused division of Muslim votes to the advantage of the BJP.
The Rampur seat is being considered as the axis of bypolls to 11 assembly seats in the state.
The BSP, contesting from Rampur for the first time, fielded customs officer Zuber Masood Khan while the Congress fielded Arshad Ali Khan who had left the party in 2012 to join the SP but returned home in 2017.
If Tazeen Fatma wins the seat, the SP will waste little time in terming the cases registered against Azam Khan by the BJP government as political vendetta.
The Rampur seat has been consistently won by SP, especially since Azam Khan began contesting for the party in 1980, save for 1996 when this seat was won by the Congress.
If BJP candidate Bharat Bhushan Gupta wins from this seat, it will not only break SP’s decades-old record but will send a message that Muslims voters are not reluctant to vote for the saffron party. Political observers, however, are of the opinion that Gupta is not a strong candidate and may prove costly to the BJP.
Bypoll to the Rampur seat was necessitated after Azam Khan was elected to the Lok Sabha in 2019.
The voters in Rampur comprise 52% Muslim and 17% Dalit voters.