‘I take PM attack as a compliment, that he is monitoring my election, is afraid of me returning as MP’: Danish Ali

The Amroha Lok Sabha seat in western Uttar Pradesh is perhaps the only constituency that has seen campaign stops by top leaders of all parties in the state’s poll fray. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for the BJP, Rahul Gandhi for the Congress, Akhilesh Yadav for the Samajwadi Party, and Mayawati for the BSP, have all come calling.

The reason appears to be one candidate in the fray: BSP-turned-Congress leader Kunwar Danish Ali, the sitting MP from Amroha, which votes on April 26.

In their rallies, Modi and Mayawati even singled out Danish Ali, though without taking his name. Ali, who had found himself the target of communal slurs by BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri on the floor of Parliament in the outgoing House, was expelled by Mayawati after he was seen as inching close to the Congress after the episode. In her speech,Mayawati accused Ali of “betraying” the party and the people of Amroha, the first time she spoke on the issue after his expulsion.

Modi attacked Ali for “turning down” the invite for the Ram Temple consecration ceremony and for objecting to the slogan “Bharat Mata ki Jai”. “Should such a person who does not like to pay gratitude to his motherland be allowed to enter Parliament?” the PM said.

Ali, a joint candidate of the SP-Congress alliance, is facing the BSP’s Mujahid Husain and the BJP’s Kanwar Singh Tanwar in Amroha. While Husain, whose wife is a nagar panchayat member in Ghaziabad district, could cut into the SP-Congress Muslim votes, Tanwar (a Gujjar leader) has a base in Amroha, having won from the seat in 2014 by a margin of 1.58 lakh votes. In 2019, Ali, fighting as a joint candidate of the BSP and SP, had defeated Tanwar by 63,248 votes.

Ali speaks to The Indian