Even though the ruling BJP appeared to have been siding with the brutal gangs of cow vigilantes in Alwar in the last one year, the massive defeat of the saffron party in the by-polls for two Lok Sabha and one Assembly seats shows that common people did not like this cow politics.
Caravan News
JAIPUR: In the last one year, the Alwar district in Rajasthan had earned notoriety for bloody cow vigilantism as two Muslim dairy farmers were lynched in two separate incidents of mob lynching in the name of cow. After each of these incidents, leaders and ministers of the ruling BJP appeared to be siding with the attackers. But the massive defeat of the saffron party in the by-polls for two Lok Sabha and one Assembly seats now shows that common people did not like this cow politics.
After counting of 100% of votes in the Alwar Lok Sabha by-poll by Thursday evening, Karan Singh Yadav of the Congress was leading by 1,96,496 votes. He garnered 6,42,416 votes, leaving behind Jaswant Singh Yadav of the BJP at 4,45,920 votes. The Election Commission has officially declared the results. In 2014, BJP had won this seat with a margin of over 2.8 lakh votes.
The elections, held on January 29, were necessitated as BJP’s MP Mahant Chand Nath died in September last year following a prolonged illness.
Several times in the last eight months, brutal gangs of cow vigilantes had resorted to violence in the Alwar district in the name of cow and at least two Muslim dairy farmers were killed in two separate attacks.
The first incident took place in April last year when Haryana dairy farmer Pahlu Khan, 55, was lynched by a mob in the daylight here and his two sons were brutally assaulted. They were returning from Jaipur after purchasing some cows and calves from a government-run cattle fair.
Ironically, the BJP has got humiliating defeat a week after the Alwar police filed second charge sheet in the Pahlu Khan lynching case charging him and his four companions of cow smuggling. Interestingly, the charge sheet was filed on Jan 24, four days before the constituency went to poll.
In November last year, Ummar Khan, 35, and his co-villagers Tahir and Jabir were attacked in Alwar by a gang of cow vigilantes. While Khan was shot dead, the other two survived with injures. Bharatpur native Ummar and his co-villagers were returning home from Ramgarh with a few cows when their pick-up vehicle was waylaid in Alwar and they were attacked with firearms. While Ummar, father of 8 children, died on the spot, Tahir and Jabir managed to flee with the bullet wounds. The attackers later took Ummar’s body and put it on a railway track, 15 kms from the site of the attack. They did so to destroy the evidence of the murder and to show his death as an accident.
Besides Alwar, BJP has been defeated by Congress on the Ajmer Lok Sabha seat also. With 100 per cent of the vote count over, Raghu Sharma of the Congress was leading by 84,414 votes by securing 6,11,514 votes. The BJP’s Ram Swaroop Lamba had got 5,27,100 votes. The Ajmer seat had fallen vacant as BJP MP Sanwar Lal Jat passed away in August last year. In 2014, BJP’s margin of victory here was over 1.7 lakh votes. The BJP had won all the 25 Lok Sabha seats in Rajasthan in 2014.
The by-poll was held for Mandalgarh Assembly constituency also. After BJP getting lead in the initial hours, Congress bounced back and won the seat with a margin of 12,974 votes.
BJP’s rout in the crucial elections ahead of the upcoming full-fledged Assembly elections in the state Assembly is a clear evidence that common people are feeling cheated by rhetorics of the BJP governments at the centre and in the state.