MEERUT: Days after it cemented an alliance with Samajwadi Party for Lok Sabha elections, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) appointed its MLA Yakub Qureshi as in-charge of Meerut-Hapur seat on Tuesday. The BSP leader had hit the headlines in 2006 when he had announced Rs 51-crore bounty on the head of a Danish cartoonist for making ‘blasphemous’ cartoons on Islam. Recently, his daughter allegedly barged into a Meerut school with a whip and thrashed a few girls who complained about her niece’s bunking school.Announcing the decision, Shamsuddin Raeen, the West UP in-charge of the party, said: “I am merely a postman and I have come here with a message from BSP supremo Mayawati . She has asked me to tell you all that Yakub Qureshi has been finalised as in-charge for Meerut-Hapur seat for Lok Sabha polls.”Soon after the announcement, there was cheer and applaud among the crowd. For the first time, SP and BSP workers got together to celebrate Mayawati’s 63rd birthday in Meerut on Tuesday as they cut a 63-kg cake here. It was a mix of red and blue at the ‘Jan Kalyan Sammelan’ here, as SP members sported their red caps with a BSP blue stole. Senior leaders of both the parties were in attendance at the venue in Meerut’s Shastri Nagar.“We are going to contest the elections with all our might. SP and BSP have come together only to throw BJP out of power. The BJP government is nothing but a party which came to power by making false promises. It is time that the masses look beyond BJP’s ‘jumlebaazi’ and vote for the SP-BSP alliance,” said Qureshi. Asked whether the controversies involving him, like the 2006 case when he announced Rs 51-crore bounty on a Danish cartoonist, won’t hamper the party’s prospects, Qureshi, said: “That was purely a religious matter and not a political one. Anybody has the right to put forward their concerns if anything against their religion is said or done. It was politicised for no reason.”

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