All set for Phase 6 of Uttar Pradesh election on Thursday

Vibha Sharma

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Varanasi, March 2

The stage is set for the penultimate round in the long-drawn battle for Uttar Pradesh. The 57 seats in Phase 6, which go to the polls on Thursday, include Gorakhpur Urban from where Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is contesting.

Main rival Samajwadi Party has fielded the wife of late BJP leader Upendra Dutt Shukla against Adityanath.

The 10 districts where polling will be held are Ambedkar Nagar, Balrampur, Siddharthnagar, Basti, Sant Kabir Nagar, Maharajganj, Gorakhpur, Kushinagar, Deoria and Ballia.

Apart from Adityanath, prominent among the 676 candidates include state Congress president Ajay Kumar Lallu (Tamkuhi Raj), Swami Prasad Maurya, who quit as minister in the Adityanath government in favour of the SP (Fazilnagar), and senior Samajwadi leader Ram Govind Chaudhary (Bansdih).

State ministers in the fray are Surya Pratap Shahi (Pathardeva), Satish Chandra Dwivedi (Itwa) and Jai Pratap Singh (Bansi), Shree Ram Chauhan (Khajani) and Jai Prakash Nishad (Rudrapur).

It is also the area where BSP’s social engineering, on which the BJP is also counting, will be tested.

Only a strong BSP can ensure a triangular fight in an election which has largely been between the BJP and the Samajwadi Party so far. A triangular fight in Purvanchal can ensure a split of anti-BJP votes and perhaps also a few seats for the BSP.