The arrests and long imprisonment of 10-time MLA and Samajwadi Party (SP)’s stalwart Azam Khan, 77, who was among its founding leaders, has left a vacuum in the principal Opposition party in Uttar Pradesh.
In an attempt to fill the void left in the SP’s Muslim leadership ahead of the 2027 state Assembly polls, party president Akhilesh Yadav seems to have turned to Naseemuddin Siddiqui, a long-time state legislator and former Cabinet minister, who spent more than three decades in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and eight years in the Congress before joining the SP on February 15.
Last November, nearly two months after he walked out of jail, Azam Khan was sent behind the bars again after a special court for MPs and MLAs in Rampur sentenced him to seven years’ imprisonment in a forgery case involving two PAN cards. The court also sentenced his son, former MLA Abdullah Azam Khan, to a seven-year jail term in the same case.
Azam Khan, who had founded the SP alongside its late patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, has been the party’s tallest Muslim leader and among the most prominent minority faces in UP. He held Cabinet posts in every SP government under Mulayam, and when the party’s reins were passed on to his son Akhilesh, Khan’s clout still remained unchallenged.
In 2012, when the SP came to power in UP under Akhilesh, Khan was allotted eight ministries and was considered the party’s most powerful leader after Akhilesh. Opposition parties would often say that there were “several chief ministers” in CM Akhilesh-led government – including Mulayam, his brother Shivpal Yadav, his cousin Ram Gopal Yadav, and Khan. Under the SP governments, Khan’s home turf, Rampur, was seen as a power centre – next only to Lucknow, the seat of power, and Etawah, the Yadav family’s stronghold.
Like Khan, Siddiqui, as a prominent minority face, enjoyed a similar clout in the BSP and was considered “No. 2” in the Mayawati Cabinet during her government’s last tenure from 2007 to 2012.
When asked about Siddiqui’s importance for the SP as compared to Khan, a senior party leader said, “Siddiqui had been approaching the SP leadership for a long time. We thought if he is not inducted into the SP, he may strongly raise the issue of Muslim concerns under the current state government while campaigning for the Congress for the 2027 Assembly polls, which could have shifted some of our Muslim votes to our ally. At present, Muslims are overwhelmingly with the SP. Still, we do not want to develop any gaps. So, Siddiqui has been taken in.”
Initially, the senior SP leader said, an SP faction had been hesitant about inducting Siddiqui, citing his “dramatic exit” from the BSP in 2017. After the BSP’s rout in the 2017 Assembly polls, he alleged that Mayawati had demanded Rs 50 crore from him, prompting the BSP chief to expel him from the party for “anti-party activities” and label him a “taping blackmailer” who had “edited” the audio clips to incriminate her. A day later, he released seven audio clips, accusing Mayawati of allegedly demanding money from ticket aspirants.
“Releasing the audio clips was like a betrayal within the BSP leadership that had given him so much importance and power in government and party. That view was discussed within the SP. But the top leadership decided to take him because Siddiqui has a following among Muslims in Bundelkhand and Awadh regions and he is a known face. He joined the SP with a large number of influential leaders from the Muslim community. He will be helpful for the SP,” the senior SP leader said.
On filling the vacuum left by Khan, another SP leader said, “Azam sahab always tried to dominate and make his influence felt in the party. He often got upset, skipped meetings and forced party leadership to bow down before him even when the SP was in power. Siddiqui is not like that. He may not be as popular as Azam, but he will never try to dominate. In his joining speech, Siddiqui assured that he and others joining with him will work as ‘juniors’ within the party.”
Siddiqui began his political career in Banda district of the Bundelkhand region, where he was first elected from the Banda Assembly seat in 1991 and went on to serve as a minister in successive BSP governments in 1995, 1997 and 2002. His influence peaked between 2007 and 2012 during the BSP’s full-majority tenure, when he was considered among the most powerful ministers.
In 2018, Siddiqui joined the Congress and was included in key party panels and, in 2019, was appointed president of the Congress’s western zone after the party divided its UP unit into six organisational zones. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, he contested from Bijnor but suffered a rout, polling just 2.34% of the vote share. When he resigned from the Congress in January, he claimed he was “sidelined” in the party.
At Siddiqui’s induction event at the SP headquarters in Lucknow, when a reporter suggested that some in the party saw Khan’s image in Siddiqui, Akhilesh quipped, “Get your eyesight checked because you are not able to see anything.”
“Everyone here in this hall knows that injustice has happened with the respected Azam sahab. Everyone here wants him to get released. It is tough for him to get justice without the government and the court. All the cases against Azam sahab are fake,” Akhilesh said.
SP spokesperson Udaiveer Singh said, “The SP is fighting against the BJP to save democracy in the country. Siddiqui ji has joined the SP to strengthen the party in that fight.”
An SP insider said the party’s focus on bolstering its support among Muslims was reinforced by its performance in the 2022 Assembly polls, when it won 111 seats in the 403-member House. A total of 34 Muslim MLAs were then elected, with 31 of them from the SP and three others from its former allies, Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP).