Samajwadi Party MLA and ​Azam Khan's son Abdullah Azam disqualified from UP assembly after conviction in 15-year-old case

LUCKNOW: Abdullah Azam Khan, Samajwadi Party (SP) MLA from Rampur's Suar constituency, was disqualified from the Uttar Pradesh assembly on Wednesday, two days after a special court in Moradabad sentenced him to two years of imprisonment in a 15-year-old Chhajlet incident.
Khan is the son of Azam Khan, a senior leader of the Samajwadi Party.
The UP assembly secretariat issued a notification announcing the suspension of Abdullah's membership from February 13 (the day the court announced the sentence). With this, bypolls will be necessitated on the seat which Abdullah has been winning since 2017.
Abdullah will not be able to contest an election for the next six years, according to the Representation of People Act. Though officials said that the condition would be subjected to a possible relief from the high court.
The Chhajlet incident dates back to January 29, 2008, when the then SP MLA Azam Khan, Abdullah and their supporters staged a sit-in on the Haridwar national highway in protest of being stopped by police for checking.
Police had stepped up the checking of vehicles in the aftermath of a terror attack on Rampur's CRPF camp on January 1, 2008, which claimed the lives of eight people including seven jawans.
The court on Monday convicted Azam and his son Abdullah in the case and sentenced them to two years of imprisonment. A fine of Rs 3,000 each was also imposed on them. They were convicted under section 353 (criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty) and other provisions of the Indian Penal Code (IPC)
The court has though accepted the bail application of the father-son duo while giving them a month's time to file an appeal in the high court. Earlier, the court had let off SP's Amroha MLA Mehboob Ali, Nagina MLA Manoj Paras, former SP MLAs Naimul Hasan and Ikram Qureshi who were also accused in the case.
Abdullah was earlier disqualified from the UP assembly in 2020 after the Allahabad high court set aside his election on December 16, 2019. The high court had ruled that he was not qualified to contest the election as he was below 25 years of age when he filed his nomination papers as an SP candidate from Suar in the 2017 assembly elections.
In October last year, Azam Khan had lost his assembly membership after an MP-MLA court sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment on charges of delivering a hate speech during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Likewise, in November, BJP MLA from Khatauli Vikram Ssaini lost his membership after the MP-MLA court indicted him for his alleged involvement in the Muzaffarnagar riots.
In the subsequent bypolls, Rampur was won by BJP's Akash Saxena, while in Khatauli, SP-backed RLD candidate Madan Bhaiyya defeated Saini's wife Rajkumari Saini who was contesting as a BJP candidate.