The melody vs the gutter speech of UP's Kairana

The birthplace of Kairana gharana is a Gujjar-dominated seat where SP's Muslim and BJP's Hindu candidates are Gujjars from the same clan

Kairana, the small town in west Uttar Pradesh, has a glorious and melodious linkage to the most influential gharana of Hindustani classical music. The name, Kairana gharana, which thrives in Maharashtra and Karnataka, comes from the west UP town where the founder of the gharana, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, was born in 1872. He is acknowledged as one of the artists who defined Hindustani classical music (he died in 1937).

The journey of the gharana begins with the Ustad being employed as a court musician by the Gaekwads of Baroda. There he would meet Tarabai Mane, a member of the royal family, and the two fell in love. Because the family disapproved, they left the state and moved to Bombay (today, this would be called 'Love Jihad'). The couple would separate in 1922, but five children were born of that union, all accomplished musicians, particularly Hirabai Barodekar. The personal life of Abdul Karim Khan was colourful and, in every sense, a synthesis of the Hindu and the Muslim.

He left a musical legacy that would travel to Maharashtra and the Hubli-Dharwad belt of Karnataka, where this great school of music is still nurtured. One of the most famous students of the Ustad would be Ramachandra Kundgolkar Saunshi, popularly known as Pandit Sawai Gandharva, who would, in turn, be the guru of Bhimsen Joshi and Gangubai Hangal, among others. As the anecdotes about great musicians go, Bhimsen Joshi is said to have once heard a recording of Abdul Karim Khan singing a thumri on the radio and would say that inspired him to want to pursue singing seriously.

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The same Kairana is often in the news for all the wrong reasons now that election season is upon us. On January 23, Union Home Minister Amit Shah made an important gesture in the ongoing Uttar Pradesh election when he arrived in Kairana that votes in the first phase on February 10. The second most important individual in the command structure of the BJP then went door to door to campaign. One may ask, why Kairana?

Possibly because since 2016, Kairana has been part of the narrative of polarisation between Hindus and Muslims in the region, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its lawmakers claiming that about 250 Hindu families migrated out of Kairana due to fear of "Muslims and criminals". It is a highly contested claim. Kairana is currently part of the Shamli district that was created out of the Muzaffarnagar district: it is indeed a constituency with a substantial Muslim population. It's hard to get the demographics of the entire constituency, but Kairana town, according to data drawn from the 2011 Census, has an 80 per cent Muslim population.

Presumably, the home minister went there because the narrative of "Hindu in danger" is essential to the BJP's strategy for the first two phases of voting in west UP, on February 10 and 14. This is the region with the highest percentage of Muslims in Uttar Pradesh. Kairana is also part of the belt severely hit by the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 that set Jats against Muslims. Link this up to the fact that three days after visiting Kairana, the home minister summoned the BJP's Jat leaders. At the meeting, he even suggested that the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), led by Jayant Chaudhary, has been misled into going into an alliance with the Samajwadi Party (SP) and has chosen "a wrong home", implying that the doors of the BJP are open to that party. (The RLD is traditionally seen as the party of the Jat community).

But Kairana itself is a seat dominated by the Gujjar OBC community, and both the Muslim candidate of the SP and the Hindu candidate of the BJP are Gujjars who historically belong to the same clan and family, with one wing having converted to Islam. We can therefore see the glass as empty and imply that there is some great hatred among the Gujjars of Kairana. Or we can see the glass as half full and note that after posturing during elections, the two political clans of Kairana get back to living quite peacefully, side by side. As the locals say, "they are all related to each other".

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Here is a quick wrap of the two political Gujjar Muslim and Gujjar Hindu "dynasties" of Kairana. The BJP candidate is Mriganka Singh, the daughter of the late BJP lawmaker Hukum Singh, who first raised the "exodus" question and later implied it was more about law and order than religion but there was a certain ambiguity in his positions. He became the MP from Kairana, winning in the 2014 wave that brought Narendra Modi to power.

But after his death in 2018, a Lok Sabha byelection took place that was won by Tabassum Hasan, who had also won that seat in the 2009 general election as a member of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). (She would lose to the BJP in 2019). Tabassum Hasan is the wife of the late Chaudhary Munawar Hasan, who is seen as the founder of the Gujjar Muslim political dynasty of Kairana. Before his death in 2008, he had been both an MP and an MLA from Kairana from the SP. The current candidate of the SP-RLD, Nahid Hasan, is the son of Tabassum and Munawar Hasan. He is also the sitting MLA and has cases against him under the gangster act that the family insist are all political. (Akhilesh Yadav has also stated that the cases against Nahid Hasan were all lodged by the current BJP regime).

Nahid Hasan will be facing Mriganka Singh of the BJP, who has lost previous elections to him, but she gets the BJP ticket because father Hukum Singh was the only individual who could get the better of the Hasan family's apparent political dominance in the seat. Both families incidentally originally belonged to the same Khap about a century ago. Another interesting nugget is that when Tabassum Hasan won the byelection in 2018 as an RLD candidate, she was briefly the only Muslim MP from UP. In the current election, Kairana is considered a safe seat for the SP-RLD. It's a seat that has many stories to tell, some of hate but also those that invoke harmony in melody.

(Saba Naqvi is a journalist and an author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.