Azam Khan has only 3 options to get justice, says Akhilesh
Lucknow:
Samajwadi Party
chief
Akhilesh Yadav
has said that jailed party veteran
Azam Khan
has only three options to get justice — change of govt in UP, court of law, and divine intervention.
Akhilesh's reaction came after Azam's wife and former SP MP Tazeen Fatima in an apparent reference to the party leadership said she had no hope from anyone to secure her husband's release from jail.
"Humein kisi se bhi nahi umeed hai … agar umeed hai to sirf Allah se (We don't have any hope from anyone … God is our only hope now)," an emotional Tazeen had told reporters after meeting her husband in jail on Thursday. She had added that Azam Khan (76) suffers from several ailments and needs better medical care in the jail.
Asked to respond to Tazeen's statement, Akhilesh, too, sounded helpless. "Hum kis se kahen? (Whom do I go to?)," he told reporters on Friday, adding that under the present circumstances the veteran politician could get justice under three scenarios.
"One: If there is a change of govt," Akhilesh said, suggesting that situation will change if SP forms govt after 2027 assembly polls. During his Rampur visit in Nov 2022, Akhilesh had announced that all false cases against Azam Khan would be withdrawn once SP forms govt.
According to Akhilesh the other two scenarios under which Azam Khan can get justice was through the Court of Law and by the intervention of the Almighty.
Azam, a founding member of the party and its prominent Muslim face for three decades, has been in jail since Oct 2023 and has over 89 criminal cases pending against him.
This is not Azam's first stint in jail. He spent 27 months in jail before the Supreme Court granted him bail in May 2022. Most of the 89 criminal cases pending against Azam were lodged within the first two years of the BJP forming the government in UP in 2017.
Tazeen Fatima and her son — disqualified SP MLA Abdullah Azam — too had been in jail in some cases and are currently out on bail.
While SP has always maintained that Azam Khan has been implicated in false cases by Yogi govt, the party had ben accused of not standing by Azam Khan "as strongly as it should have had".
During 2022 assembly polls, CM Yogi Adityanath had claimed that Akhilesh Yadav did not want Azam Khan to come out of jail as that would put SP chief's position in danger.
During his stint in BSP, now Congress MP from Saharanpur, Imran Masood, had said that only SP was to be blamed for Azam Khan's troubles.
The SP, on the other hand, insists that it has always stood by Azam's family. Party functionaries cite Akhilesh Yadav leading a 1km cycle rally in Rampur on March 12, 2021 to highlight the plight of Azam Khan; visits by Akhilesh Yadav and Shivpal Yadav to Azam in jail, and party functionaries submitting memorandum with UP governor, raising the issue in the Assembly as some of the initiatives taken by the party and its leadership to express their solidarity with the veteran leader.
Senior functionaries claim that the party leadership had a role in senior lawyer Kapil Sibal pleading Azam Khan's case before the Supreme Court in May 2022. Sibal had put up some strong arguments and the SC granted bail to Azam. In May 2022, Sibal contested the Rajya Sabha elections as an independent candidate. He was supported by the SP and won the seat. Akilesh Yadav and party's principal general secretary Ram Gopal Yadav had accompanied Sibal during filing of his nomination papers.
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