Owaisi to begin campaigning for UP polls from Kairana

Muzaffarnagar: Hyderabad-based All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) will kick-start its UP Assembly poll campaign on Friday from Kairana in neighbouring Shamli district here. AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi would address an election meeting in support of his party candidate on January 13, party spokesperson Shadab Chouhan said in Shamli last evening. The party has released a list of its 11 candidates, including Masiulla from Kairana constituency, for the first phase of Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls. AIMIM would raise issues related to the deprived sections of the society including backward classes and Dalits, spokesperson said. Meanwhile, Muzaffarnagar district authorities have started security arrangements for the forthcoming assembly polls in six constituencies in the first phase on February 11. According to SP City Rajesh Kumar Singh, 80 companies of paramilitary forces would be deployed. Last year, Kairana grabbed attention when BJP MP Hukum Singh released a list of Hindu families which the MP claimed had left their homes and fled because of "threat and extortion by criminal elements belonging to a particular community." Political parties, especially Congress and Samajwadi Party, had slammed BJP for trying to stoke communal tension in Uttar Pradesh ahead of the state Assembly elections. Later in September, a probe team of the National Human Rights Commission had found that many families "migrated" due to threats pertaining to "increase in crime" and "deterioration" of law-and-order situation there.