UP Election Results 2022: SP's Mohammad Azam Khan wins Rampur seat by 55141 votes

In Rampur, the contest is really between SP and Congress. (Representational image; Photo: Pexels)

In Rampur, Samajwadi Party's candidate Mohammad Azam Khan defeated BJP's Akash Saxena (Honey) by 55,141 votes.

Candidates in the fray were SP's Azam Khan, Congress' Kazim Ali Khan, BJP's Aakash Saxena, AAP's Faisal Khan, BSP's Sadaqat Hussain, and two independents Habib Ul Zafar Khan and Javed Khan.

This was a hotly contested seat. SP’s Azam Khan had filed his nomination from the jail, where has been lodged since February 2020, for various charges including land grab and defamation.

Khan has won this Assembly seat nine times in the past, as a candidate of various parties.

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The sitting MLA is currently his wife Dr Tazeen Fatma, who had won by a narrow margin of 7,716 votes against BJP’s Bharat Bhushan. She had contested in the 2019 by-polls after Azam Khan had resigned, after winning the Lok Sabha seat that year from Rampur parliamentary constituency with a thumping margin. He got nearly 1,10,000 votes, defeating BJP’s Jayaprada Nahata.

Soon after, Khan was arrested under various charges. In one of his speeches, CM Yogi Adityanath seemed to have made a reference to Khan, when he said that 'Rampuri chakus' (knives made in this part of Uttar Pradesh) were meant to protect people, but the knives had been used to extort and rob people under the SP regime. Adityanath said that those who had misused the knives were now paying the price.

For this state election, BJP fielded Akash Saxena, who emerged as an anti-graft campaigner and who even filed several of the cases against Azam Khan. In fact Saxena, who is the son of former BJP minister Shiv Bahadur Saxena, has filed 80 cases against Azam Khan.

While Saxena may have the anti-corruption plank to launch himself from, the real challenger to Azam Khan was from the Congress’ stables.

Indian National Congress’ candidate Kazim Ali Khan is of royal lineage. He is a descendant of Nawab of Rampur. But Kazim Ali is also politically influential, having won three elections–2002, 2007 and 2012–from the neighbouring Suar Assembly constituency. But in the last Assembly elections, Kazim Ali was defeated by Azam Khan’s son Abdullah. 

Priyanka Gandhi had been to Rampur to campaign for all the Congress candidates in the district.