Sadaf Jafar had already begun her election campaign and met about 12,000 families when Priyanka Gandhi Vadra announced her candidature from the Lucknow Central Assembly constituency on January 13.

The 46-year-old human rights activist was confident of getting the party ticket and had also released her own manifesto on social media two months ago, focusing largely on local civic problems.

“I wanted to contest the election and have now got the opportunity. Born and brought up in Lucknow, I know these people personally. I know about their issues and the solutions,” Sadaf, mother of a 12-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son, said.

Sadaf is among the many women who have spoken about being victimised by Yogi Adityanath’s administration and have found a place in the Congress’s first list of 125 candidates.

Policewomen had pulled her by the hair and punched and kicked her in public when she participated in a protest in Lucknow against the Citizenship Amendment Act on December 19, 2019.

Sadaf was the only woman among the protesters to be kept in a police lockup for the entire night before being sent to jail the following day. She says the police tortured her in custody and abused her for “eating India’s bread and praising Pakistan”.

She emerged smiling from the Lucknow district jail on January 7, 2020, after receiving bail following the police’s failure to prove her involvement in any crime.

“Those who don’t know Lucknow’s culture take decisions about governance and law and order here. They don’t know that I’m the real resident of this city and they are outsiders, intruders, encroachers and anti-nationals,” Sadaf, a former schoolteacher, said.

“Adityanath is anti-national because he is anti-constitutional and such people cannot break the spirit of a nationalist.”

Adityanath was born and brought up in Uttarakhand before settling in Gorakhpur. Sadaf’s principal opponent, law minister Brijesh Pathak, belongs to Unnao.

Sadaf said: “I, as a citizen of India, am entitled to certify Adityanath as anti-national because he was not willing to arrest a rapist lawmaker (Kuldeep Singh Sengar, eventually handed a life term) in Unnao; because he ordered his police to burn a gang-raped and murdered girl from Hathras, and because he ignored Allahabad High Court’s orders to bring down my posters that he had ordered put up across Lucknow.”

In January 2020, the state government had put up pictures of about 100 alleged anti-CAA protesters, including Sadaf’s, with their names and addresses and a figure representing the damage to public property each had purportedly caused. Sadaf was accused of damaging property worth Rs 64 lakh, which was to be recovered from her.

Sadaf approached the high court, which in February 2020 ordered the posters in her name pulled down. But they remained in place for several more months.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Congress general secretary, appointed Sadaf as national coordinator of the All India Mahila Congress in December 2020.

Pitted against Pathak, Sadaf is banking on her door-to-door campaign.

“I will defeat him if I can convince people about the anti-nationals’ designs on my city. However, I’m not here for one election, I’m here for life and will contest every Assembly election in future. I’m not a migrant here and need the people to understand this,” she said.

“People come and go but I have been here since childhood and will die here. Lucknow is a secular city from where the fanatics will soon withdraw.”

Sadaf said she had the support of Hindus as well as Muslims in a constituency where the population ratio is 70:30.

“Both communities are deprived of good government schools, clean drinking water, clean sewers and a proper garbage disposal system. The Haidar Canal in my area often overflows into houses. I have promised in my manifesto to change the situation,” she said.

Sadaf’s uncle, Mohammad Jafar, was Uttar Pradesh Congress general secretary in the 1950s and a member of the state legislative council. It’s after six decades that another member of the family has joined active politics.

Lucknow Central votes in the fourth phase on February 23. It had last elected a Congress candidate in 1985.