Lagatar24 Desk
Lucknow, Jan 20: Chandrashekhar Azad, chief of the Bhim Army, has announced that he will run for the seat of Gorakhpur in the forthcoming Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. He will face off against Yogi Adityanath, the incumbent chief minister and senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
On January 18, Azad, a vocal critic of the BJP, stated that his political organisation, the Azad Samaj Party, is open to forming an alliance with others, but that his struggle has always been with the ruling party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Gorakhpur is Adityanath’s hometown and one of the BJP’s oldest strongholds. The BJP announced on January 16 that Adityanath would run for the Gorakhpur urban seat in the 2018 election.
The UP election will be held in seven phases, beginning on February 10 and ending on March 7. For March 3, the Gorakhpur urban seat will be voted on in the sixth phase. On March 10, the votes will be counted.
Gorakhpur is located in eastern Uttar Pradesh and has 160 of the state’s total 403 assembly seats. Radha Mohan Das Agarwal of the BJP now represents the seat, which she has won four times. Since the Ram temple campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the constituency has been a stronghold for the BJP.