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Lucknow: Days after Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav flagged his party’s campaign for the 2027 UP Assembly elections from Noida, the BJP-RLD alliance is set to play out its poll card from Muzaffarnagar, the epicentre of Jat politics in west UP region.CM Yogi Adityanath and RLD chief and Union minister
Jayant Chaudhary
will hold a joint rally in Muzaffarnagar on April 13. Earlier in the day, they will attend an employment fair in the district. This would perhaps be the first joint rally where the two leaders will share the dais. Yogi and Jayant even as the BJP-led NDA scales up preparation for the high-stakes UP Assembly elections due early next year.Sources said the rally, to be organised at Numaish Ground in the heart of the city, will be attended by senior BJP functionaries from west UP and many UP ministers, including Kapil Dev Agarwal, Somendra Tomar and Anil Kumar.
While Agarwal and Tomar are from the BJP, Anil Kumar is an RLD legislator.BJP’s Muzaffarnagar president Sudhir Saini told TOI that the organisation will give its full support to bring maximum number of possible to the rally. RLD workers, too, have been asked to coordinate with the BJP to make the event a success.Muzaffarnagar is an RLD stronghold where it has four MLAs out of six Assembly seats in the district — Budhana, Purquazi, Khatauli and Meerapur.
BJP’s Kapil Dev Agarwal is MLA from Muzaffarnagar seat while the Charthawal seat is represented by Samajwadi Party’s Pankaj Malik.RLD dominated the elections in Muzaffarnagar in the 2022 Assembly elections when it contested as an ally of the Samajwadi Party. But it snapped the alliance before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections after Modi govt conferred the Bharat Ratna posthumously on former PM and Jayant Chaudhary’s grandfather Chaudhary Charan Singh.But electoral dynamics changed in Muzaffarnagar in the 2024 LS elections when SP’s Harendra Malik, a Gurjar, wrested the seat from BJP’s Sanjeev Balyan, a Jat. The defeat, analysts said, exposed cracks in the Jat-Gurjar coalition which the BJP-led NDA had been flagging while countering the SP in the region.Akhilesh, too, has ratcheted up his Gurjar outreach by promising a grand statue of Mihir Bhoj, the 9th-century ruler of the Gurjar-Pratihara dynasty, at the Gomti Riverfront in Lucknow.
Alongside, he is also taking up issues pertaining to Gurjars.Analysts say Muzaffarnagar has been a political bellwether since post-2013 polarisation phase and remains a testing ground for caste alignments. Since RLD currently holds grips over the district by having four MLAs, BJP aligning visibly with RLD leadership in this turf could potentially help bridge local credibility gaps. t the joint rally also serves an important optics function. It signals that the BJP-RLD alliance is not merely transactional but operationally cohesive — from booth-level coordination to shared platforms.
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