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, ha

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