Voters alleged election fraud in UP bye-poll. Now data mirrors their claims

The first time that the Samajwadi Party’s Mohammad Rizwan contested against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Ramveer Singh in Kundarki assembly segment in Uttar Pradesh, he won by more than 17,000 votes.

That was 2012. The two clashed again in 2017. Despite a triangular contest and a BJP wave, the Samajwadi Party pulled through. Rizwan won by more than 10,000 votes. In 2022, the Samajwadi Party won with an even larger margin: 43,162 more votes than the BJP.

Kundarki, a constituency in Moradabad district, was a hard fort to breach for the BJP. The Hindutva party had never won in the majority-Muslim constituency – until 2024.

In November, Rizwan and Singh locked horns once again in Kundarki, this time in a bye-poll. It had become necessary because its former legislator, Zia ur Rehman Barq, had elected member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha elections earlier that year.

In a shock result, Singh won the bye-poll with an unprecedented margin of 1.4 lakh votes. The BJP secured nearly 77% of votes, up from 30.4% in 2022, while Samajwadi Party collapsed from 46.3% in 2022 to a mere 11.5%.

What led to this remarkable reversal? When Scroll reported from the constituency in 2024, Muslims alleged large-scale voter suppression by officials during the bye-poll. Some claimed...

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