Kairana exodus: BJP MP takes U-turn

A week after raising the bogey of a “Hindu exodus” from Uttar Pradesh’s Kairana, a small town in Shamli district, the local BJP MP Hukum Singh made a rapid U-turn on Tuesday and said that the people leaving their homes had nothing to do with communal tension.

The U-turn came as a major embarrassment for the BJP which, during its national executive at Allahabad, was all set to make the so-called “Hindu exodus from Kariana” as one of its main election planks. Hukum Singh, incidentally, is an accused in the Muzaffarnagar riots case.

The saffron game plan virtually fell flat when its own MP, who had earlier submitted a list of 346 families, ostensibly forced to flee Kairana, a Muslim-dominated town, over communal tension, on Tuesday changed his stance to say, “The list had both Hindu and Muslim names. This is not a Hindu-Muslim situation... This is not a communal matter.” For Mr Singh, it’s now a “law and order problem.”

When grilled about the previous list which indicated that a particular community was fleeing Kairana following threats and intimidation, Mr Singh offered this explanation: “Someone in my team mistakenly mentioned Hindu families. I asked them to change that. I stick to my stand that this is not a Hindu-Muslim issue. This is just a list of people of who have left under duress.”

The MP, however, released yet another list of 63 people who had, according to him, moved out of their homes in the city of Kandhla in Kairana district.

He kept harping that what Kairana was witnessing was a law and order problem, but quickly added that there would be “no danga” (riots).” About the fresh list, Mr Singh said, “I stand by names mentioned in the list. However, I am always subject to correction.”

If the MP was trying to extricate himself out of the controversy his list had created, the local MLA, Suresh Rana, another accused in the Muzaffarnagar riots, was singing a different tune. He told the media that there “is actually a threat and protection was being provided only to a particular community.”

The district authorities, however, had a different story to tell. “This district is very peaceful. Even when riots were reported in adjacent districts not a single case of violence was reported in Shamli. Most of the people in the village either have small businesses or work in factories in Haryana. Panipat is only 25 km away from here,” district magistrate of Shamli district Sujeet Kumar said.

So was Hukum Singh trying to pull off a political stunt before the forthcoming Assembly elections in the state

“Not a political stunt. I had expressed concern over this in the past as well. It’s a law and order problem. The state government has failed miserably in maintaining law and order in the state,” the BJP MP said.

A week ago BJP MP Hukum Singh claimed that 346 Hindu families had moved out of Kairana due to “threat and extortion by criminal elements belonging to a particular community.”

The list released by him included names of the heads of families, their addresses and what they were doing before fleeing Kairana.

“The local people come to me ever since I made the list public; telling me the number is too small,” Mr Singh had said then.