Uttar Pradesh Elections 2022: The counting of votes will take place on March 10. (File)
Lucknow:
Fifty-seven seats in eastern Uttar Pradesh across 10 districts will vote today in the penultimate stage of the election. One of the leading candidates is Prime Minister Yogi Adityanath, who is contesting his first election poll from Gorakhpur.
Here’s your 10-point cheat sheet on the poll’s sixth stage:
With 292 of the state’s 403 parliamentary seats already voted, the focus has shifted to the state’s crucial Purvanchal region, which has 111 seats, more than a quarter of the total.
The BJP had won 46 out of 57 seats in the 2017 polls. The seats are spread across Ambedkar Nagar, Balrampur, Siddharthnagar, Basti, Sant Kabir Nagar, Maharajganj, Gorakhpur, Kushinagar, Deoria and Ballia.
Yogi Adityanath, the five-time MP from his Gorakhpur stronghold, is fighting from the Gorakhpur Urban seat. In 2017 party MLA Radha Mohan Das Agrawal won the seat by a margin of 60,000 votes.
The Samajwadi party has pitted the wife of the late Upendra Dutt Shukla, a former BJP leader, against the Chief Minister. Azad Samaj Party founder Chandrashekhar Azad is also confused.
The fact that the Chief Minister is entering the contest this time has raised expectations of a major victory in all nine assembly seats under the Gorakhpur parliamentary constituency. In 2017, the BJP had won eight of the nine seats.
The outcome at this stage will largely depend on the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and Most Backward Castes (MBCs) impacting nearly 30 seats. The BJP hopes to gain support from the dominant boating community through its alliance with the NISHAD party.
The main challenger, Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi party, is counting on ally Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj party, which has broad support among the Rajbhars and other MBCs. The SBSP has placed candidates on eight seats.
In addition to the Chief Minister, the prominent candidates at this stage include the President of the State Congress, Ajay Kumar Lallu, who is fighting from the Tamkuhi Raj seat, Swami Prasad Maurya of the Samajwadi Party from the Fazilnagar seat, and Ram Govind Chaudhary, the leader of the opposition Samajwadi party, of the Bansdih.
State ministers Surya Pratap Shahi is pleased with Pathardeva, Satish Chandra Dwivedi of Itwa, Jai Pratap Singh of Bansi, Shree Ram Chauhan of Khajani and Jai Prakash Nishad of Rudrapur.
The vote on the remaining 54 seats in Uttar Pradesh will take place on March 7. The votes will be counted on March 10.
