Lucknow, March 1
The sixth phase of polling ended on Tuesday evening for 57 assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, including Gorakhpur Urban, from where Chief Minister Adityanath is in the fray.
Ten districts—Ambedkar Nagar, Balrampur, Siddharthnagar, Basti, Sant Kabir Nagar, Maharajganj, Gorakhpur, Kushinagar, Deoria, and Ballia—will vote from 7 am till 6 pm on Thursday.
State Chief Electoral Officer Ajay Kumar Shukla said that the campaigning for the sixth phase ended at 6 pm and all preparations have been completed for the polling on Thursday.
Prominent among the 676 candidates in this phase are Adityanath, who is contesting his first assembly election, state Congress president Ajay Kumar Lallu (Tamkuhi Raj), Swami Prasad Maurya, who quit as ministers to join the Samajwadi Party (Fazilnagar). . and Leader of Opposition in the state assembly and senior Samajwadi Party leader Ram Govind Choudhary (Bansdih).
The Samajwadi Party (SP) has fielded former BJP leader Late Upendra Dutt Shukla’s wife against Adityanath.
Uttar Pradesh ministers in the contest are Surya Pratap Shahi (Pathardeva), Satish Chandra Dwivedi (Itwa) and Jai Pratap Singh (Bansi), Shree Ram Chauhan (Khajani) and Jai Prakash Nishad (Rudrapur).
Surendra Singh, the sitting MLA from Ballia’s Bairia, who joined the VIP, a new entrant in the electoral politics of Uttar Pradesh, will also have to face voters in this phase.
These 57 seats, of which 11 are reserved seats, are crucial for the BJP, which won 46 of these in 2017.
Senior leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Adityanath, BJP President JP Nadda, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav and Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi visited the districts to campaign for their respective parties.
Prime Minister Modi had attacked the BJP rivals by tagging them as ‘ghor parivaarwadis’ (radical dynasties) which, he said, can never make India capable or empower Uttar Pradesh.
Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi refuted saying that the BJP is only against her family, which has not bowed down to the saffron party.
During the election campaign in these seats, SP chief Yadav had accused the BJP of hatching a conspiracy to end reservation and selling the private sector to government organizations.
There are a total of over 2.14 crore voters in this phase.