New Delhi/Lucknow: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Parliament from Western Uttar Pradesh’s Kairana, Hukum Singh passed away in a hospital in Greater Noida on Saturday evening. Hukum Singh, who had won the 2014 Lok Sabha election with a massive margin, had been suffering from an illness for the last few months. Parliament proceedings will be cancelled on Monday to pay condolences to the deceased Member of Parliament. He was 79 years old at the time of his death.
While the full details of Singh’s illness are yet to emerge, highly-placed BJP source said he had been suffering for the last three months. “He was unwell for three months, but it wasn’t that bad until last month. For the last 20 days or so, he has been bedridden and was struggling to hold on. Even though he had kept himself healthy for most of his life, age seems to have caught up,” said one BJP leader.
Born in Shamli district’s Kairana, which he went on to represent in the Lok Sabha, Hukum Singh started practising law in the nearby city of Muzaffarnagar in 1969. By 1974, he entered active politics and became a Member of the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly (MLA) after contesting on a Congress ticket. In the 1990s, he switched from Congress to the BJP and got elected to the UP assembly on a BJP ticket in 1996. Hukum Singh quickly rose up the ranks of politics due the massive support he enjoyed from Western UP’s sugarcane farmers. In 2014, when Modi wave swept through Uttar Pradesh, Hukum Singh was elected as the Member of Parliament from his hometown. His followers affectionately referred to him as ‘Babu Sahab’.
Hours after his death, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted his condolences and said, “Anguished by the demise of MP and veteran leader from Uttar Pradesh, Shri Hukum Singh Ji. He served the people of UP with great diligence and worked for the welfare of farmers. My thoughts are with his family and supporters in this hour of grief.”
Sanjeev Balyan, Hukum Singh’s friend, colleague and MP from neighbouring Muzaffarnagar, told News 18, “Babu Sahab was a true son of the soil. From the very beginning of his life till the very end, he was connected to the farmers of the region and he understood their pain like few else would. We have lost a great leader with his death.”
However, Hukum Singh’s political career was not without its fair share of controversy. In 2013, his name featured among the list of BJP MPs who were accused of stoking communal violence in UP’s Muzaffarnagar. Communal tensions in western UP were at a high in the months of June and July in 2016 after Hukum Singh alleged that 250 Hindu families had fled Kairana in a “mass exodus” over the last few years due to “pressure from another community”. Singh went as far as to claim that Kairana was becoming “another Kashmir” with Hindu families fleeing. While the BJP leadership endorsed his claims, the district administration and the ruling Samajwadi Party had vehemently denied them.
According to the local administration, “only three families” had left Kairana due to “worsening law and order”. Singh, however, received a huge fillip after the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) vindicated his claims and held riot-refugees responsible for altering the demographics of the small town. This had led to a disagreement between the NHRC and the National Commission for Minorities (NCM), which held that the reports of an ‘exodus’ were exaggerated.
Singh was also accused of nepotism and lobbying for his daughter Mriganka Singh, who contested and lost the 2017 UP Assembly polls from the Kairana seat.
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