6th phase of UP polls tomorrow: Yogi Adityanath, Swami Prasad Maurya among key candidates

Lucknow, Mar 02: Uttar Pradesh will go to the sixth phase polling on Thursday sealing the fate of political heavyweights such as Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the Congress' Ajay Kumar Lallu and Samajwadi Party's Swami Prasad Maurya.

With voting for 292 out of 403 assembly seats over, the polling has now moved to the Purvanchal region of the state where 111 seats are up for grabs.

Of the remaining constituencies, 57 seats, spread across 10 districts, will go to the polls on Thursday and 54 in the final phase on March 10.

The districts that are going to polls are Ambedkarnagar, Balrampur, Siddharthnagar, Basti, Sant Kabir Nagar, Maharajganj, Gorakhpur, Kushinagar, Deoria and Ballia.

These 57 assembly segments, of which 11 are reserved, are crucial for the BJP. In the 2017 assembly polls, it had won 46 of these seats.

Among the 676 candidates in the fray this time are Yogi Adityanath from Gorakhpur Urban fighting his first assembly polls, state Congress president Lallu from Tamkuhi Raj seat and Swami Prasad Maurya, who quit as BJP minister to join the Samajwadi Party, from Fazilnagar.

The Samajwadi Party has pitted the wife of late Upendra Dutt Shukla, a former BJP leader, against Adityanath. Azad Samaj Party founder Chandrashekhar Azad is also a contesting against the chief minister.

Leader of Opposition in the outgoing assembly and Samajwadi Party leader Ram Govind Chaudhary is contesting from Bansdih.

Many incumbent ministers' electoral fate will also be decided in this phase.

They include Surya Pratap Shahi trying his luck from Pathardeva seat, Satish Chandra Dwivedi from Itwa, Jai Pratap Singh from Bansi, Shree Ram Chauhan from Khajani and Jai Prakash Nishad from Rudrapur.

Surendra Singh, the incumbent MLA from Bairia in Ballia, who joined the Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP), a new entrant in Uttar Pradesh electoral politics, will face the electorate in this phase.

He had crossed over to the VIP after being denied a ticket by the BJP. There are a total of over 2.14 crore voters in this phase.