UP assembly elections: Yogi Adityanath’s big victory in Gorakhpur urban

According to the Election Commission of India, Adityanath, who is contesting the assembly elections for the first time, got 85,356 votes while his nearest rival SP candidate Subhavati Upendra Dutt Shukla got 30,498 votes.

Azad Samaj Party President Chandrashekhar Azad got only 4,501 votes.

Adityanath represented the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat until 2017, when he was elected as the Chief Minister of UP following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s landslide victory in the state elections. The Gorakhpur Sadar seat has also been a BJP stronghold, which the party has never lost since 1967, from the days of the Jan Sangh.

Meanwhile, as the counting of votes is underway, according to the latest trends of the Election Commission of India, the BJP has 13 seats and is leading in 237 constituencies. Samajwadi Party is leading in 116 seats and Congress is leading in only two seats.

Yogi Adityanath was an unexpected choice for the chief minister’s post after the BJP’s landslide victory in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. A poster boy for Hindutva, Adityanath, dressed in saffron robes, was considered a flamboyant and was often accused of making provocative remarks against Muslims.

As the chief minister of the country’s most populous state, he may have done little. But not much, his critics say. With the Bharatiya Janata Party set for a second consecutive innings in the state, Adityanath is almost certain to get another term in office.

Born in Panchur (now Uttarakhand) in Pauri Garhwal, Ajay Singh Bisht left home on June 5, 1972, in 1990 to join the campaign for the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. He also became a disciple of Mahant Avaidyanath of Gorakhnath temple in Gorakhpur.

After Avaidyanath’s death in 2014, he took over as the head of the Gorakhnath ‘Math’, a position he still holds and makes frequent visits to the city in eastern UP. He was not averse to clashing with the BJP then, and founded his own band of volunteers called the Hindu Yuva Vahini.

Adityanath went to school in his native village and later completed his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University.

He entered politics in 1998 on the instructions of his mentor and became the youngest Lok Sabha member by winning from Gorakhpur at the age of 28. He represented the parliamentary seat four times until he became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh on March 19, 2017.

As CM, he took decisions that reaffirmed his image as a Hindutva mascot. Early in his tenure, he banned illegal slaughterhouses and police cracked down on cow slaughter.

His government brought in an ordinance and later a bill against conversion through force or deceit, a move that also targeted inter-religious marriages. Other BJP-ruled states followed UP’s example, coming up with their own versions of the law.