Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav will embark on the fourth leg of the Vijay Yatra on November 16 from Ghazipur to Azamgarh.
Akhilesh Yadav is Member of Parliament from Azamgarh.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will also inaugurate the Purvanchal Expressway at Sultanpur on the same day.
Earlier, too, Akhilesh had announced the third leg of his Vijay Yatra on November 13 from Gorakhpur, the hometown of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
Interestingly, the chief minister and Union Home Minister Amit Shah will be in Akhilesh’s Lok Sabha constituency on November 13. Amit Shah will lay the foundation stone of the state university in Azamgarh on the day.
The programme of political mobalisation both by the Bharatiya Janata Party and Samajwadi Party has led to speculations that Akhilesh Yadav wants to send a message that he is fighting the BJP tooth and nail. The SP, however, said it had already planned the route and dates of Vijay Yatra much in October itself.
“We had planned our campaigns long ago. Our president is touring every part of Uttar Pradesh. It is election time and, hence, programmes of different political parties may happen on the same dates. We are concentrating on our poll preparedness,” said SP spokesman Rajendra Chaudhary.
He claimed that Samajwadi Party was the main contender for 2022 UP assembly polls and the party was getting excellent responses from the people. “Leaders of different political parties are joining our party,” he added.
Political observers however say the political events organised by the BJP and SP are not mere “coincidences” but “deliberate”.
“This is not a coincidence that programmes of the SP are clashing with those of BJP. The motive behind this move seems to be to position the SP as the main challenger to the BJP,” said a political analyst, adding that this was what the BJP desired as it would ensure communal polarisation.
Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati on November 9 had alleged that SP and BJP were playing a “fixed game". The BSP chief had also alleged that the SP and the BJP were “casteist and communal” and were fulfilling each other’s aspirations by deliberately “polarising" the upcoming polls.
The assembly election in UP is due early next year along with Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa and Manipur. The BJP had won the 2017 assembly election by landslide majority winning 325 seats in a House of 403. The 325 MLAs included 13 MLA of its ally parties. The tally of the Samajwadi Party was reduced to mere 47 seats and of BSP to 17.