Muzaffarnagar riot victims say BJP victory feels like a ‘bad dream’

MEERUT: With BJP sweeping all six seats in Muzaffarnagar and two out of the three in neighbouring Shamli, the 2013 riot victims said the saffron party’s landslide win throughout the state felt like a “bad dream”. Many of them blamed it on “conscious efforts” by political parties to divide the minority votes. “People who set up one community against the other are now in power.They made their intentions quite clear by fielding all the riot-accused candidates and reaped rich dividends of it,” said Mohammad Shamshad, who had to leave his village Kutba during the riots.
In riot-scarred Muzaffarnagar and Shamli, four of the nine winners in the neighbouring districts have been booked on charges of rioting and criminal intimidation. Suresh Kumar Rana of BJP from Thana Bhawan, Nahid Hasan of SP from Kairana, BJP’s Umesh Malik from Budhana and Vikram Singh from Khatauli – all have rioting and criminal intimidation cases filed against them.
In the 2012 assembly polls, BSP had claimed three seats in Muzaffarnagar while BJP, SP and RLD had won one each. In Shamli, Congress, BJP and SP had won a seat each.
“The result is out and there is little we can do. One of the main reasons that BJP came to power is because many riot victims could not even cast their votes because their voter IDs cards were not made. All we can hope now is that no riots are engineered by them to stay in power and peaceful conditions prevail,” said a riot victim in Palda village, who did not wish to be named.
TOI had earlier reported that at least 35% of the total voters who got displaced after the riots here in 2013 were not registered with the Election Commission. A survey conducted by Afkar India Foundation, an NGO working for the riot victims, revealed that out of 19,000 displaced voters here, 6,650 didn’t have voter ID cards.