It's the first working day after an extended Diwali break, stretching the office hour rush to well past 11am. Amid honking two-wheelers and fume-belching auto-rickshaws a small cavalcade tries to manoeuvre past the traffic snarls on Lucknow-Sultanpur highway.
Every inch of the roadside space is plastered with buntings and hoardings. CM Akhilesh Yadav will kick-start his election campaign from the state capital on Thursday. Naseemuddin Siddiqui takes a look around, dons his trademark shades and tries to focus on work at hand.
The BSP leader, party's Muslim face and perhaps one of the most trusted lieutenants of Mayawati, is on his way to Mohanlalgunj. Thirty five kilometres from Lucknow, Naseemuddin will be addressing a bhaichara sammelan in support of the party candidate, a retired IAS officer contesting on BSP ticket.
He's stood by Behenji through the thick and thin. As the party faces, perhaps, its toughest political challenge after being wiped out of the last Lok Sabha polls, Siddiqui has been entrusted with a key task in the new socio-political alliance BSP is attempting to cement before the upcoming polls: the Dalit-Muslim combination.
"SP will be reduced to less than 60 seats. And we are way ahead of BJP," he tells party workers at a brief stopover before the public meeting. With the SP imploding, it is BSP which is now trying to make UP polls a BJP vs BSP contest. The political message to the minorities is clear: a strong BSP with a solid Dalit vote bank is better placed to take on the BJP.
This precisely has also been the preponderant message in Mayawati's rallies over the last two months. She was the first one to raise the issue of Dalits being flogged in Una during the Monsoon session of parliament. Ever since then, the larger political message from the BSP has been that both Dalits and Muslims have been at the receiving end under the current dispensation in Delhi.
Naseemuddin Siddiqui takes the same message to the masses, albeit, at the micro level. It's an onerous task. And there are reasons for that.
In politics, it is perception that counts. Perhaps that's the only thing which matters. It's been almost two decades that BSP last struck a post-poll alliance with the BJP to form the government here. So it is not without reason and purpose that Siddiqui launches into a long-winding declamation on Mulayam Singh Yadav and his politics.
"Do you know Mulayam Singh and Kalyan Singh were the minister in the same Janta Party government in 1977," he says.
The crowd listens in. Siddiqui makes an earnest appeal to Muslims to give BSP one chance, for once to join hands with the Dalits.
Then pauses, looks around and ends his speech with an urdu couplet:
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