Kejriwal says BJP ‘imported’ Hans Raj Hans for Delhi’s reserved North West seat

India वोट Kar | May 4, 2019

'BJP 'imported' Hans as it might suspect nobody seems to be 'qualified'

On Saturday, AAP chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal again targeted Sufi singer Hans Raj Hans, the BJP’s Lok Sabha candidate from North West Delhi, saying Dalits would punish the party for bringing in an outsider.

Kejriwal’s charge

Hans is from Punjab, and Kejriwal said Delhi’s Dalit community was very angry that the constituency, reserved for Scheduled Castes, had been given to someone from outside the capital. In a tweet he said the BJP had been unable to find a Dalit in Delhi it considered worthy of a ticket, and that Dalits would take revenge for the insult.

In North West Delhi, Hans faces AAP’s Gugan Singh and the Congress’s Rajesh Lilothia. The BJP had dropped its sitting MP, Udit Raj, who then joined the Congress.

Eligibility row

This was not the AAP’s first attack on the singer’s candidacy. On Thursday the party cited media reports from 2014 to suggest that Hans had converted to Islam and might therefore be ineligible to contest a seat reserved for Dalits. Kejriwal tweeted that Hans would eventually be disqualified and urged voters not to waste their votes on him.

There were media reports at the time that the singer had embraced Islam during a visit to Pakistan, but Hans and his sons denied this in 2014 itself. He was quoted as saying he respected Islam but that the report of his conversion was untrue.

See also: Aam Aadmi Party and our constituency pages.

Originally published on 4 May 2019. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.