Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Tuesday filed his nomination papers for the Legislative Council by-polls.
Deputy Chief Ministers Dinesh Sharma and Keshav Prasad Maurya also filed their nominations for the five seats that go to polls.
Two other Uttar Pradesh Ministers Swatantra Dev Singh and Mohsin Raza also filed their nomination papers.
Top BJP leaders, including state assembly Speaker Hriday Narayan Dixit, state BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey, Finance Minister Rajesh Agarwal and several other Ministers were present at the time of filing of nominations.
The by-polls were necessitated due to the resignation of four Samajwadi Party (SP) MLCs Buqqal Nawab, Yashwant Singh, Sarojini Agarwal and Ashok Bajpai, and BSP's Jaiveer Singh.
The five BJP candidates are not members of either House of the state legislature. They have to become members of either House by September 19, six months from the date they were sworn-in as Ministers.
The poll panel, however, solved the BJP's problem by releasing the poll schedule for the fifth seat vacated by the BSP MLC.
The term of Nawab and Singh was to end in 2022 and that of Agarwal and Bajpai in 2021. However, they quit all of a sudden this month. Agarwal, Bajpai and Nawab have since joined the BJP.
The notification for by-polls was issued on August 29 and the last date of filing nominations is September 5. The last date of withdrawal of candidature is September 8.
Polling will be held on September 15 between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Counting of votes will be done on the same day at 5 p.m. The poll process will be completed before September 18, the poll panel has said.
By choosing to go to the Upper House, Adityanth joins the list of his predecessors Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati, who too were members of the Legislative Council.
Adityanath, who was sworn-in as the Chief Minister of a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Uttar Pradesh on March 19, is a member of the Lok Sabha from Gorakhpur.
Maurya is a Lok Sabha member from Phoolpur while Sharma was the Lucknow Mayor before he was sworn-in as Adityanath's deputy. Both Adityanath and Maurya are yet to quit their respective Lok Sabha seats.
--IANS
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