The Uttar Pradesh Assembly poll campaigning for penultimate phase six voting on Tuesday ended on a pleasant and sunny day this evening.
A total of 68 constituencies across 13 districts in western UP would witness polling in Saharanpur, Prabuddha Nagar, Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Baghpat, Ghaziabad, Panchsheel Nagar, Gautam Budh Nagar, Bulandshahr, Aligarh, Mahamayanagar, Mathura and Agra. An electorate of over 21 million, the maximum in all the seven phases, are eligible to cast their votes with 1,103 candidates, including 85 women, in the fray.
As UP polling is nearing its conclusion, top political leaders of respective parties have pulled all stops to canvass in favour of their candidates. Those on campaign trail on Sunday include the heads of all the major political parties such as Congress president Sonia Gandhi, her BJP counterpart Nitin Gadkari, BSP supremo and UP chief minister Mayawati and Samajwadi Party’s Mulayam Singh Yadav.
Other prominent figures canvassing for their party candidates, included BJP leaders Rajnath Singh, Uma Bharti, BSP leader Satish Chandra Mishra, Samajwadi Party leaders Akhilesh Singh Yadav, his uncle Shivpal, Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi, Rita Bahuguna Joshi, Jitin Prasad, Beni Prasad Verma and Janata Dal (United) president Sharad Yadav.
The first five phases had covered 275 Assembly constituencies across 52 districts of the total 403 constituencies and 75 districts respectively. The voting percentage had ranged between 57-62 per cent vis-à-vis 36 per cent voting in 2007 Assembly election. Western UP has a sizeable Muslim, Jat and Dalit population. While the last two phases of polling would test the efficacy of the pre-poll alliance of Congress and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) in consolidating the Jat and Muslim votes, it would also be incumbent on the ruling BSP to prove its Dalit support base was still intact.
In the last Assembly poll, BSP had won the maximum 35 seats in the 68 constituencies going to poll in this phase, followed by BJP (12), RLD (10), SP (three) and Congress (two).
Industrial hubs such as Agra, Moradabad, Aligarh, Saharanpur, Ghaziabad, Noida (Gautam Budh Nagar) and Bareilly will go to polling in the remaining two phases.
