Voting for the sixth and final phase of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections began on Thursday morning, with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and several prominent faces among the 676 candidates contesting 57 seats spread across 10 districts. Voting began at 7 am and will continue till 6 pm. Around 2.15 crore people are eligible to vote in this phase. So far, voting has been done on 292 out of 403 seats in the assembly.
The last phase of polling for the remaining 54 seats will be held on March 7. The districts where polling is being held on Thursday are Ambedkar Nagar, Balrampur, Siddharth Nagar, Basti, Sant Kabir Nagar, Maharajganj, Gorakhpur, Kushinagar, Deoria and Ballia. Among the 676 candidates in this phase are CM Yogi Adityanath from Gorakhpur Urban and State Congress President Ajay Kumar Lallu from Tamkuhi Raj seat. Swami Prasad Maurya, who was a minister in the Adityanath government and had left the BJP to join the Samajwadi Party, is contesting from Fazilnagar.
Five important seats to go to the polls in the sixth phase
Gorakhpur (Urban)
Gorakhpur Sadar seat has been a BJP stronghold for nearly 31 years and Yogi Adityanath, who has been MP from Gorakhpur many times, will contest his first assembly election from there. In the 2017 election, he entered the state assembly through the Legislative Council.
Adityanath heads the Gorakhnath temple, the high seat of the Nath monastic sect founded by Matsyendranath in the 10th century. The temple is a politically influential temple. The Chief Minister is pitted against Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad from Gorakhpur Urban Constituency.
The SP has fielded Shubhavati Shukla, widow of the late BJP Upendra Dutt Shukla, against Adityanath in Gorakhpur, demanding a division of votes on the basis of anti-Thakur votes in Gorakhpur.
padrauna
Pawan Kumar Upadhyay of the BSP, Mohammad Zahiruddin of the Congress, Vikrama Yadav of the SP and Manish Jaiswal of the BJP will contest from the Muslim-populated western Uttar Pradesh seat in the sixth phase. Padrauna is the home constituency of Congress-turned-BJP leader RPN Singh. Meanwhile, AIMIM has also fielded its candidate Javed Khan from this seat.
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Ajay Kumar Lallu, a close aide of state Congress president and Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi, is contesting from Tamkuhi Raj constituency in Kushinagar district. In 2012, Lallu won the seat by defeating Nand Kishore Mishra of BJP by a margin of 5,860 votes. In 2017, he was re-elected by defeating Jagdish Mishra of BJP by a margin of 18,114 votes.
Deoria
Deoria seat, held by BJP’s Janmejay Singh since 2012, Shalab Mani Tripathi, a close aide of UP CM Yogi Adityanath and media advisor, will contest this time against BSP’s Ramsharan Singh Sainthawar, SP’s Ajay Pratap. The by-election was necessitated by the sudden demise of Janmejay Singh in 2020, which was won by Dr Satya Prakash Mani Tripathi of the BJP, an influential leader of the Tripathi community.
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The seat will see a contest between sitting BJP MLA Dr Satish Chandra Dwivedi and SP veteran Mata Prasad Pandey, a 79-year-old former UP speaker who won the seat six times – 1980, 1985, 1989, 2002, 2007 and 2012. .
In 2017, Dwivedi of BJP defeated Pandey and Arshad Khurshid of BSP. The other candidates are Harishankar Singh of BSP and Khurshid of Congress.
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