Lok Sabha Elections 2019:Battle shifts to eastern UP poll arena in 6th phase

Lok Sabha Elections 2019: In Uttar Pradesh, Sultanpur and Pratapgarh are witnessing a triangular contest among the BJP, the SP-BSP-RLD alliance and the Congress. There is a straight fight between the BJP and the alliance on 11 seats.

Voting is taking place in 14 Lok Sabha constituencies in eastern Uttar Pradesh in the sixth and penultimate round of polling on Sunday.

Voters in queue at polling booth thana gaadi, Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh,during the sixth phase of voting in Lok Sabha elections. (HT Photo)

Another 13 seats in the eastern part of the state will go to polls in the last phase on May 19.

Barring Azamgarh, the BJP had won all the other sixth-phase seats in 2014. This time too, Azamgarh is the only seat where the outcome seems to be predictable. Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav is in the fray in the seat, which his father and SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav had won five years ago. The BJP has never won the seat.

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Sultanpur and Pratapgarh are witnessing a triangular contest among the BJP, the SP-BSP-RLD alliance and the Congress. There is a straight fight between the BJP and the alliance on 11 seats.

The combined vote share of the SP and BSP on almost all these seats in 2014 was higher than the BJP.

Although the land is fertile, the region has some of the most backward districts in the country. Flood is a perennial problem in most of the districts. Unemployment and migration are issues of concern and so is the lack of industries.

Azamgarh is among the most watched constituencies where Akhilesh Yadav, widely seen as the driving force behind the opposition alliance, is contesting his first election as the SP chief. His father Mulayam Singh Yadav is the sitting MP. While the Congress has not fielded a candidate against Akhilesh, the BJP pitted a political novice, Bhojpuri singer-actor Dinesh Lal Yadav 'Nirahua', against him. The BJP has never won this seat.

Rita Bahuguna Joshi, who did not win the 2009 and 2014 Lok Sabha polls as a Congress candidate in Lucknow, has since then moved to the BJP. She won the Lucknow Cantonment assembly seat on the BJP ticket in 2017. The Kumbh 2019 in Praygraj was held under her watch as the UP tourism minister. She is now contesting from the Allahabad Lok Sabha constituency, which her father the late UP chief minister Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, had won in 1971. He lost to Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan in 1984.

In her attempt to enter the Lok Sabha, she is up against SP-BSP alliance candidate Rajendra Singh Patel, who is giving her a tough fight.

The BJP shifted its sitting Pilibhit MP Maneka Gandhi to Sultanpur, where she is locked in a triangular contest with Chandra Bhadra Singh of BSP and former Sultanpur MP Sanjay Sinh of the Congress.

The contest in Ambedkarnagar has become a bipolar one by default as Congress candidate's nomination was rejected.

Jagdambika Pal is the BJP candidate in Domariyaganj, where he had won as a Congressman in 2009 and as a BJP nominee in 2014.

Professor Kaushal Kishore Mishra, who teaches political science at the Banaras Hindu University, said, “The sixth and the seventh phases spread across the whole of eastern UP are equally important. The trend of the sixth phase will follow in the seventh phase which has 13 constituencies, including Varanasi, the centre of eastern UP and politics of the country at present. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in the fray in Varanasi. Two union ministers, Manoj Sinha and Anupriya Patel, are candidates in Ghazipur and Mirzapur. Voting in all these seats is scheduled in the seventh phase on May 19. The party which does well in the region will emerge victorious and play a key role in politics at the Centre."