Samajwadi Party MP Azam Khan is playing the sympathy card to ensure victory of his wife Tanzeen Fatima in the bypoll to the Rampur Assembly seat that he vacated after being elected to the Lok Sabha in May this year.
An astute politician, Khan is using the multiple cases lodged against him to ensure that Muslims do not desert him in his hour of crisis breaks into tears during his election meetings.
“In this long political journey, I have not gained a kilo of weight but instead lost 22 kg weight in the past two months,” he says at one meeting.
As tears rolls down his cheeks at another meeting, Khan says: “I am being termed a criminal because I am your lawyer. I was framed because I fought for the general public and the general good.
“My crime is that I opened schools and colleges to ensure that your children get good education and I am being called a thief for this. If I lose these institutions, then I will be left with nothing.”
“This BJP government believes that I am a thief and should be hanged,” he adds, “According to them, I have stolen books, statues, goats, buffaloes, land but they do not know that I have also stolen your hearts and I am proud of this.”
The reference was obviously to the multiple cases of land grabbing that have been registered against the SP leader related to the Maulana Jauhar University that he has built.
Khan said that in his political journey, he always stood up for the masses. He is on the verge of losing the institutions which he opened for the common good. “I thought there were people who considered me a good politician and a good person,” he said.
In one meeting he said he was being targeted because he happened to be a Muslim.
Rampur has over 70 per cent Muslim population and the road to success is not easy for the Khan family this time because the BSP and Congress have also fielded Muslim candidates.
“It is precisely because of this that the Samajwadi Party had fielded Tanzeen Fatima so that the sympathy factor can be used to the hilt,” said Taufeeq Alam, a local journalist.
Azam Khan is currently facing a slew of criminal cases in connection with land encroachments by the Mohammad Ali Jauhar University. Khan is presently booked in 84 cases with charges that include land grabbing, encroachment, theft of books, statues, buffaloes, and goats, and forgery.-IANS News
