UP Election 2022: Mukut Bihari Verma among 20 legislators dropped; BJP fields sitting MLA from Ayodhya
The BJP seems to have made significant changes in the districts of Gorakhpur, Kushinagar, Deoria, and Sant Kabir Nagar in eastern UP where Adityanath has influence.
FollowAhead of the upcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) released its seventh list of candidates, giving tickets to 91 candidates, including the incumbent lawmaker from Ayodhya, Ved Prakash Gupta.
The BJP seems to have made significant changes in the districts of Gorakhpur, Kushinagar, Deoria, and Sant Kabir Nagar in eastern UP where Adityanath has influence. The party, in its latest list, fielded 13 ministers for the polls. It also gave tickets to 25 OBCs (other backward classes), 21 Dalits, 20 Brahmins and 18 Thakurs among others.
Besides retaining its sitting MLA from Ayodhya Ved Prakash Gupta, the party has again fielded 13 ministers including Siddharth Nath Singh from Allahabad West, Nand Gopal Gupta ‘Nandi’ from the Allahabad South seat, and Agriculture Minister Surya Pratap Shahi from the Pathardeva seat.
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While the party has dropped Co-Operative Affairs Minister Mukut Bihari Verma, his son has been given a ticket from his Kaiserganj seat in Bahraich. The BJP has also given a ticket to Yogi Adityanath’s media adviser Shalabh Mani Tripathi from Deoria seat.
On various seats, the saffron party has replaced sitting MLAs with their family members. For instance, in Bikapur in Ayodhya district, in place of Shobha Singh Chauhan, her son Amit Singh Chauhan, a medical practitioner, will contest. In Goshainganj seat in the same district, it has fielded Aarti Tiwari, wife of MLA Indra Pratap alias Khabbu Tiwari, who had been disqualified from the UP Assembly following his conviction in a 28-year-old case of alleged use of fake mark sheet for getting admission in a college.
The Central Election Committee (CEC) has finalised almost all candidates for all the remaining seats of Uttar Pradesh, say sources, adding that the names will be announced over the next few days.
