Yakub Quraishi is a bigot who rewards bigotry

Who is Yakub Quraishi, the man who announced a reward of Rs 51 crore for the terrorists who attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris?

Well, he's a man with a history of celebrating bigotry. In 2006, Quraishi declared a reward of Rs 51 crore to anyone who would kill the Danish cartoonist who drew a controversial cartoon of Prophet Muhammad. The BSP politician is a prominent member of  the Quraishi community of western Uttar Pradesh. He has more than a dozen meat factories in Meerut, Moradabad and Saharanpur.

In 2007, Quraishi first became an MLA after being elected from the Meerut Assembly seat on a ticket of the Uttar Pradesh United Democratic Front (UPUDF). After the election, the BSP came to the power and in September 2007, Quraishi merged his party UPUDF with the BSP. Before the 2012 Assembly elections, Mayawati denied him an Assembly ticket, so he promptly left the BSP and joined the Ajit Singh led Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD). He contest the 2012 Assembly election from Meerut on an RLD ticket but lost.

Before the 2014 general elections, he again joined the BSP and contested from Moradabad. As Mayawati was facing a shortage of Muslim leaders in western UP, she gave him a parliamentary ticket from Moradabad after cancelling the candidature of her party's Tara Chandra Shastri, a prominent BSP leader from the "Saini" community. Quraishi lost the parliamentary election to the BJP candidate.  

After the general elections, when Mayawati started her party's preparations for the 2017 Assembly elections, Quraishi was the first Muslim candidate to be declared from west UP. Quraishi will contest the 2017 Assembly election from the Meerut South seat. His son Imran Quraishi will also be a BSP candidate for the 2019 parliamentary elections from the Meerut-Hapur Lok Sabha seat.

With the police registering a case against Quraishi in the Meerut police station, such notorious and offensive edicts will keep him in the headlines, he reckons.