More than 120 years ago, two major political clans, the Hasans, and Singhs, belonged to the same family and were governed by a single khap, in Kairana. The rivalry began when one of the ancestors converted to Islam.
According to a report in The Times of India, when the BJP issued its first list of 107 candidates for the UP elections, it chose Mriganka Singh, the daughter of the late MP Hukum Singh, as its candidate from Kairana. The present MLA, Nahid Hasan, was on the SP list for the same constituency. The Singhs and Hasans were merged into one family over a century ago, led by Baba Kalsa.
On January 15, Nahid Hasan was arrested and taken into judicial custody as he made his way to the Kairana Sessions Court to “surrender” in a pending case from February 2021.
According to Kairana’s Suhaib Ansari, “until a few years ago, Hukum Singh was considered the Hindu group’s leader, while Munawwar Hasan, Nahid’s father, led the Muslim wing,”.
Kairana has been sending representatives from both of these families to the state assembly and the Lok Sabha, since the early 1990s.
The two families’ long-standing political rivalry has now passed down to the next generation. In the 2017 state elections, Munawwar Hasan’s son Nahid defeated Hukum Singh’s daughter Mriganka. Then, in the 2018 Lok Sabha by-elections, Tabassum Hasan, the widow of Munawwar Hasan, defeated Mriganka.
