Lucknow. Voting will be held in 58 assembly seats in 11 districts of the state on Thursday under the first phase of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. All the districts where voting will be held in the first phase are from the western region of the state. Voting will start at 7 am and will continue till 6 pm.
According to the information received from the Election Commission office, all the preparations have been completed for the first phase of elections. Polling will be held in Shamli, Hapur, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Baghpat, Ghaziabad, Bulandshahr, Aligarh, Mathura and Agra districts in this phase. The campaigning work for the first phase came to a halt at 5 pm on Tuesday.
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A total of 623 candidates are in the fray in the first phase of elections and there are 2.27 crore voters in this phase. The first phase of elections will be held in a Jat dominated area. In this phase, the political fate of the state government ministers Shrikant Sharma, Suresh Rana, Sandeep Singh, Kapil Dev Agarwal, Atul Garg and Chaudhary Laxmi Narayan will be decided.
In the last assembly elections held in 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had won 53 out of 58 seats in the first phase, while the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) got two seats each. Apart from this, a candidate of Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) also won. Most of the campaigning for the first phase of elections was done digitally due to the ban on rallies and road shows by the Election Commission in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while spearheading the BJP’s election campaign, referred to the achievements of the party-led governments at the Center and in Uttar Pradesh and asked people to beware of “fake socialists” while attacking the SP-RLD alliance. Apart from this, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath repeatedly raised the issue of exodus of Hindus from Kairana before the year 2017.
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On the other hand, SP President Akhilesh Yadav and RLD chief Jayant Chaudhary during their election campaign strongly raised the issues of farmers and accused BJP leaders of lying. BSP president Mayawati, who made a late start to her election campaign, reminded people of the law and order situation in the state during the tenure of her previous government and accused rival parties of “cheating” the people of the state. Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra went door to door to the voters and sought votes. (agency)