LUCKNOW: With the notification for Lok Sabha elections issued by the Election Commission on Saturday, Uttar Pradesh, politically the biggest state of the country, will witness voting across all seven phases starting from April 19 and ending on June 1.
UP sends 80 members, including the Prime Minister, to the lower house of Parliament. Varanasi, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a candidate, and Gorakhpur, considered the stronghold of CM Yogi Adityanath, will vote in the seventh and last phase on June 1.
Adityanath had represented Gorakhpur in Lok Sabha from 1998 till 2014, and the seat is now represented by Bhojpuri actor Ravi Kishan.
While the BJP has repeated Ravi Kishan in Gorakhpur, the Samajwadi Party has fielded model Kajal Nishad.
State capital Lucknow, once the stronghold of former PM late Atal Bihari Vajpayee and now represented by defence minister Rajnath Singh, will vote in the fifth phase, along with Rae Bareli and Amethi, the Gandhi family bastions, on May 20.
Ayodhya and the four seats of Bundelkhand region will also go to polls in the fifth phase. Voting in the Samajwadi Party’s strongholds will be held in the third and fourth phases — Mainpuri, Etah and Firozabad under Agra division in the third on May 7, and Etawah and Kannauj in the fourth on May 13.
Dimple Yadav, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav’s wife, is sitting MP from Mainpuri. In the first phase, 8 seats of western UP, including constituency number 1 Saharanpur and Rampur, bastion of SP’s jailed leader Azam Khan will vote on April 19. Eight seats will vote in second phase on April 26 and 10 in third phase on May 7.