Amroha Lok Sabha Elections: The Seat’s Unique Record and Other Key Facts – News18

The Amroha Lok Sabha constituency is one of 80 parliamentary constituencies in Uttar Pradesh. It is a General category seat and comprises part of Hapur district and the entire Jyotiba Phule Nagar district. The Amroha Lok Sabha constituency comprises five Assembly segments, of which the BJP currently holds three (Dhanaura-SC, Hasanpur, Garhmukteshwar) and the Samajwadi Party holds two (Naugawan Sadat, Amroha). The constituency voted in the second phase of general elections on April 26, 2024.

Sitting MP – Danish Ali (BSP)

Candidates – Danish Ali (Congress), Kanwar Singh Tanwar (BJP), Mujahid Hussain (BSP)

Political Dynamics

• It’s an interesting three-way fight in Amroha this time with sitting MP Danish Ali switching from the BSP to the Congress a month before voting. The BSP has fielded Mujahid Hussain to take on the turncoat lawmaker, while the BJP has given the ticket again to Kanwar Singh Tanwar.
• Amroha, notoriously, is a swing seat and springs a surprise every election. Voters in Amroha are known to choose new candidates ever since Congress veteran Maulana Hifzur Rahman scored hat-trick of wins in the 1950s and 60s.
• Congress: The Congress and Samajwadi Party, both constituents of the INDIA bloc, are contesting the polls in an alliance this time, with the grand old party attempting to regain its lost ground in Uttar Pradesh.
• The Congress had bargained hard for Amroha in its seat-sharing talks with SP. It is one of 17 seats the party is contesting on in Uttar Pradesh. The Congress has fielded former BSP leader and sitting MP Danish Ali from the seat.
• Ali was suspended by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) on December 9, 2023 for “anti-party” activities. The suspension had come a day after the Amroha MP walked out of Lok Sabha proceedings along with other Opposition members to protest against the government’s motion to expel TMC MP Mahua Moitra for “unethical conduct”. Other BSP members had remained seated in the Lower House.
• Terming the BSP’s decision as “unfortunate”, Ali denied ever engaging in any anti-party activities, saying he had only questioned the central government on key issues.
• Danish Ali had been actively joining Opposition ranks in attacking the BJP and its policies even though the Mayawati-led BSP has maintained a distance from the ruling alliance as well as the Opposition.
• In January this year, he had joined the Rahul Gandhi-led Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra at its starting point in Manipur. He had rejoined the yatra when it passed through his constituency Amroha.
• Ali’s candidature on a Congress ticket came about after he met former Congress president Sonia Gandhi at her 10 Janpath residence in New Delhi on March 13. On March 20, he officially joined the Congress in the presence of senior leaders.
• Danish Ali was earlier with the Janata Dal (Secular) and had been the former Rajya Sabha MP from Karnataka. This is Danish Ali’s second election from the Amroha constituency.
• In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, he had won on a BSP ticket, polling 601,082 votes to wrest the seat from sitting BJP MP Kanwar Singh Tanwar who had received 5,37,834 votes. Ali had received 51.41% of the total votes polled.
• Interestingly, even if Ali wins again this time, Amroha’s trend of never electing a party twice in a row would remain intact since the last time he won on a BSP ticket and this time he is contesting as a Congress candidate.
• A win for Danish Ali would, however, be a remarkable feat for the Congress which last won Amroha in 1984. It would also be a record for Danish Ali since the last time Amroha repeated an MP consecutively was in 1977 and 1980 elections when Janata Party’s Chandrapal Singh won the elections. However, Singh won in 1977 on a Bharatiya Lok Dal party ticket, while in 1980, he was victorious on a Janata Party (Secular) ticket.
• Ramesh Bidhuri Remarks Controversy: In September last year, when Danish Ali was still a BSP lawmaker, BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri made derogatory remarks targeting him during a discussion on the success of Chandrayaan-3 in Lok Sabha.
• As the remarks led to a furore with Opposition MPs calling for strict action against Bidhuri, BJP leader Nishikant Dubey wrote to the Speaker alleging that Ali made “highly objectionable and blasphemous” remarks against Prime Minister Narendra Modi that had provoked Bidhuri.
• BJP: BJP’s Kanwar Singh Tanwar will be contesting his third election from the Amroha constituency. The 63-year-old is a Delhi-based real estate developer. With assets worth Rs 214.77 crore, Tanwar would be the richest candidate in Uttar Pradesh in the second phase of elections.
• He had won the seat in the 2014 general elections, beating nearest rival, Humera Akhtar of the Samajwadi Party, by a margin of over 1.58 lakh votes. Tanwar, however, lost the seat in 2019 to BSP’s Danish Ali by 63,248 votes.
• During the 2019 elections campaign, both Tanwar and Ali fired ‘outsider’ jabs at each other.
• Tanwar originally hails from Jhanakpuri village in Amroha district, but is settled in South Delhi.
• Amroha is one of the 23 Muslim-dominated constituencies in Uttar Pradesh the BJP had picked for its ‘Qaumi Chaupal’ programme launched earlier this year. Under the outreach programme, leaders of the BJP’s Minority Morcha were tasked with visiting Muslim-dominated villages and discuss various schemes of the government and the work done by the government for the minorities.
• Modi Factor: An image from outside the political arena likely to work for the BJP is that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugging and consoling pacer Mohammed Shami after Team India’s loss to Australia in the cricket World Cup finals last year. Shami grew up in the village of Sahaspur in Amroha.
• The BJP’s minority front had also launched a ‘Shukriya Modi Bhaijaan’ campaign in all Lok Sabha constituencies of Uttar Pradesh to draw Muslim women towards the party ahead of the 2024 general elections.
• With the tagline “Na duri hai, na khai hai, Modi hamara bhai hai” (there’s no detachment, there’s no chasm, Modi is our brother), the campaign aimed to attract at least 1,000 Muslim women towards the party.
• On March 31, thousands of people from the Muslim community, some of them part of a motorcycle rally, attended an election meeting addressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in nearby Meerut.
• RLD’s Jat Influence: Adding heft to BJP candidate Tanwar’s Jat outreach is RLD supremo Jayant Chaudhary who started the party’s Lok Sabha election campaign with a rally for the BJP candidate.
• In March, the RLD separated from the INDIA bloc and became a part of the BJP-led NDA. The switch came after the Narendra Modi government announced Bharat Ratna to former prime minister Chaudhary Charan Singh, Jayant Chaudhary’s grandfather.
• The RLD returning to the NDA gives the BJP a conduit to the Jat farmer constituency in western UP and eastern Rajasthan. However, many Jat farmers remain upset over several agrarian issues and the protest by female wrestlers.
• BSP: The Mayawati-led party has fielded Mozahid Hussain from Amroha. The electoral contest has now become a prestige battle with the BSP eager to prove that the 2019 win was because of the party and not Danish Ali.
• In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BSP contested the polls along with the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD).
• The BSP was the biggest gainer in the alliance with 10 seats. Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party won five seats while the RLD could not open its account in the polls.
• This time, the former chief minister jolted the INDIA bloc by declaring that the BSP would contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections on its own. The Congress had been seeking to rope in the BSP in the opposition grouping.
• Mayawati’s decision also dashed any hopes of uniting all non-BJP forces to put up a strong opposition against the BJP and opened the gates for a third force in the key Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh.
• The BSP supremo, however, hasn’t ruled out a post-poll alliance. She recently taunted the SP for fielding Hindus in “Muslim-dominated constituencies” and Muslims on seats where Hindus dominate.
• She has also urged Muslim voters not to split their votes, saying if the community votes for the Congress, “then the BJP will get the benefit”.
• Voting Patterns: Amroha has about 16 lakh voters with Muslims, Jats and Dalits forming a large chunk of the population. Muslim votes hold the key in the constituency, followed by the Jat and Dalit votes.Dalits are present in sizeable numbers in rural areas.
• In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the alliance of the BSP, Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal had achieved considerable success in the Muslim-dominated regions of western and northwestern UP.
• The BSP had won the Muslim-Dalit dominated seats of Saharanpur, Bijnor, Nagina and Amroha seats, while its alliance partner SP had won Moradabad, Rampur and Sambhal seats.
• However, the political equations have completely changed this time. The BSP has decided to contest the elections alone this time, while the RLD, which has some influence in the Jat community, is standing with the BJP.
• Split in Muslim votes: In 2019, the BJP had got the benefit of a split in Muslim votes in some seats of western UP, and its candidates registered wins from Muzaffarnagar, Kairana, Meerut, Bulandshahr, Baghpat and Aligarh Lok Sabha seats.
• In the changed circumstances of 2024, the biggest concern for the SP-Congress alliance will be to prevent the scattering of Muslim votes because its victory on many Muslim-dominated seats can be possible only if the Muslim votes are united in its favour.
• This time the biggest challenge for the Samajwadi Party is to keep the Muslim voters united in its favour.
• A major reason for this is that since 2019, the SP has not been as vocal on Muslim-related issues as was expected from it.
• The BSP, meanwhile, has fielded Muslim candidates on every seat where the Dalit voters are in good numbers after the Muslims.
• A section of political observers, however, say that in 2019, the BSP had benefited from the Muslim votes of SP due to which it was successful in winning 10 seats.
• There was no alliance between the two parties in the 2022 Assembly elections and the SP had won many Muslim-dominated seats in western Uttar Pradesh by defeating the BSP.
• The BJP, too, is looking to tap into Muslim voters. UP BJP minority morcha president Kunwar Basit has claimed that the party received about 10% votes of the Muslim community in 2019.
• This time the target is to increase it to 15%, especially the Pasmanda Muslims, who have benefited the most from government schemes.
• Pasmanda Muslims: PM Modi has time and again said that Pasmanda Muslims, who are backward, are not treated as equal because of vote bank politics of opposition parties.
• ‘Pasmanda’, a term for backward classes among Muslims, often finds a mention in Prime Minister Modi’s speeches, at party forum as well as government events, and how the government has worked for the deprived without any discrimination.
• The BJP believes it is in a position to make inroads among them in the Lok Sabha polls, a view emboldened by its win in Lok Sabha bypolls in Muslim-dominated seats of Azamgarh and Rampur in Uttar Pradesh.
• The BJP’s Minority Morcha has been holding events to connect with ‘Pasmandas’, who are over 80 per cent of the country’s Muslim population, and its leaders believe that a new narrative focussed around the theme of development can be productive.
• Eye on voter turnout: According to the Election Commission of India, Amroha had registered the highest turnout in Uttar Pradesh during the 2019 elections at 71%.
• The seat had also reportedly witnessed high turnout of women voters at 71.5%, compared to 70.3% for men.

Key constituency issues

• Farmers issues: Farmers’ problems are a key election issue in Amroha. Farmer unions have called for MSP guarantee and better and timely payments from sugar mills.
• Numerous sugar mills have ceased operations due to rising fuel expenses and financial constraints.
• Complaints about corruption in the electricity department have also tainted the administration’s reputation.
• Farmers are said to be dissatisfied with the implementation of Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana which they say has not been effective in covering their losses.
• This seat saw substantial participation in the farmers’ protests, and is one of the six seats in Western UP that BJP lost in 2019.
• The BJP hopes the alliance with RLD and the Bharat Ratna to farmers’ champion, the late Chaudhary Charan Singh, will offset some of the discontent among farmers.
• Interestingly, RLD’s Jayant Chaudhary had campaigned hard with local Jat farmers to oppose the NDA’s three farm laws and claimed credit for getting the Modi administration to roll them back.
• The BJP is sure to project the RLD’s return as confirmation that the Opposition’s agitation against the three farm laws was more about opposing Modi than an ideological lament against the laws themselves.
• What the farmers think matters to the BJP because the NDA, committed as it is to doubling farmer incomes, may like to revisit the three farm laws if it returns with a comfortable majority.
• CAA: In a big pre-poll move, the rules for the implementation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 were notified in March, four years after the contentious law was passed by Parliament to fast-track citizenship for undocumented non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who came to India before December 31, 2014.
• The CAA is a huge factor in Muslim-dominated constituencies across western Uttar Pradesh, including Amroha.
• Top central government ministers and senior BJP leaders have been reiterating during campaigning that no Muslim living in India will lose their citizenship.
• BJP ministers and leaders have accused the opposition parties of creating confusion in the community about the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.
• Law & Order: The brutal murder of two minor brothers in UP’s Budaun has become the talking point in western Uttar Pradesh with the Samajwadi Party targeting the BJP over the law and order situation.
• Improved law and order and tough action against gangsters and mafias has been one of the BJP’s top pitches in Uttar Pradesh.
• Ram Mandir: Eyeing Hindu consolidation in Muslim-dominated western UP, the BJP has been hoping to reap the electoral dividend of constructing the Ram Temple at the Ram Janmabhoomi in UP’s Ayodhya as it has been promising in multiple manifestos.
• It is also reminding voters that the Congress “snubbed” the consecration ceremony of the temple in January, pegging it as an insult of Lord Ram himself.
• Uniform Civil Code: After abolishing special status for J&K in 2019 and constructing the Ram Temple in Ayodhya this January, the BJP has turned its attention to its third legacy election promise — a Uniform Civil Code.
• In April last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself made a strong pitch for UCC, saying the Constitution also mentions of having equal rights for all citizens.
• Union Home Minister Amit Shah too recently reminded voters of PM Modi’s “guarantee” to bring uniform civil code in the country on the same lines as Uttarakhand.
• In April 2022, Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya had revealed that the Yogi Adityanath government is thinking seriously in the direction of implementating a Uniform Civil Code in the state.
• During the Assembly election campaign in 2022, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, too, had also spoken in favour of one law for the entire country and had said the matter would be taken up at the right time.
• With neighbouring Uttarakhand implementing one in March this year, the prospect of a UCC for Uttar Pradesh has become a factor in Lok Sabha elections, especially in minority-dominated constituencies.
• The issue of the implementation of the Uniform Civil Code does not enjoy the Opposition support besides that of Muslim bodies.
• Statehood: BSP supremo Mayawati has said her party will take “concrete steps” to make western Uttar Pradesh a separate state if voted to power at the Centre.

Voter Demographics

Social composition

SC — 18.24%

ST — 0%

Religious composition

Buddhist — 0.02%

Christian — 0.28%

Jain — 0.03%

Muslim — 39.03%

Sikh — 0.25%

Major Infra Projects in Amroha

• Ganga Expressway: This is an under-construction, 594-km-long, six-lane (expandable to eight) greenfield expressway in Uttar Pradesh. It is being constructed at a cost of Rs 36,000 crore.
• Phase-1 will connect Bijauli village on NH-334 in Meerut district with Judapur Dandu village on NH-19 in Prayagraj district, while Phase-2 will see the extension of both sides of the expressway: from Prayagraj to Ballia and from Meerut to Haridwar.
• It is being implemented by the Uttar Pradesh Expressways Industrial Development Authority (UPEIDA) on the Design-Build-Finance-Operate-Transfer (DBFOT) Model.
• It will pass through 12 districts of Uttar Pradesh, including Amroha.
• The state government has asked the developers to complete the project by December 2024, well in time for the 2025 Prayagraj MahaKumbh Mela.
• Madhya Ganga Nahar project: This is an irrigation project in Amroha that began in 2008 to irrigate 146,532 hectares of land. The project was delayed for years due to land acquisition issues, but the Yogi Adityanath government resolved these. The cost of the project has increased from Rs 1,100 crore to almost Rs 5,000 crore and the government released additional funds in 2021 to complete the project quickly.
• The 66-km Madhya Ganga canal, which starts at Bijnor Barrage, will irrigate Bijnor and Amroha districts once completed.
• Farmers in Amroha who sold the land in 2012 are now demanding higher compensation as per the 2014 changes to the land acquisition rules which provided compensation at four times the circle rate.
• Stadium in Mohammed Shami’s Village: Sahaspur Alinagar, the ancestral village of Indian pacer Mohammed Shami, will get a rural stadium, the district magistrate of Amroha announced in November 2023. The DM had added that efforts will be made to invite Shami at the foundation-stone-laying event if he is available.
• The rural stadium in Sahaspur Alinagar will be spread over an area of 1.092 hectares.
• The approximate cost of the rural stadium will be around Rs 5 crore, the DM said.
• The Amroha DM had also said that as per the directives of the state government, rural stadiums were to be built in 20 districts of the state.
• Six laning of Hapur Bypass to Moradabad Section Via Amroha: Six laning of Hapur Bypass to Moradabad section, including Hapur Bypass, of NH-24 in Hapur, Amroha and Moradabad districts of Uttar Pradesh has been proposed under NHDP Phase V.
• The existing highway section is a 4 lane road. Some of the stretches in urban settlements are having six lane configurations. The road has many settlements and the traffic flow is impacted by these conflicts.
• It is proposed to widen and improve the existing road section to standard 6-lane configuration with paved and earthen shoulders.
• Health and education-related projects: The central and state governments have dedicated roughly Rs 50 crore to establish health and education-related projects in districts with sizeable Muslim population, including Amroha.

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