The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party seems to have taken a lead over its rivals in electioneering for the civic polls with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath kicking off the campaign from Ayodhya on Tuesday while his ministerial colleagues will be visiting other regions of the state.
Yogi will set the ball rolling from Ayodhya on Tuesday while his deputies Keshav Prasad Maurya and Dinesh Sharma will address rallies in Bareilly and Kanpur respectively.
Sources said that the BJP had engaged all its state-level leaders and ministers in the campaigning and had even arranged choppers to ferry the leaders to far-flung areas. The same kind of enthusiasm is seemingly missing in the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and Congress camps.
Although the SP and BSP have not engaged their senior leadership in campaigning, with Congress giving responsibility to its state leaders, BJP is using all its might and power, particularly in the 16 mayoral elections.
Adityanath will launch the BJP poll campaign from Ayodhya and conclude at Kushinagar on November 27. It will be the first time that any CM would be campaign in civic polls.
Besides Ayodhya, Yogi will hold rallies in Gonda and Bahraich on Tuesday. He will go to Kanpur on November 15 and Allahabad the next day.
The CM will address rallies in Muzaffarnagar, Meerut and Ghaziabad on November 18 and in Ghazipur and Deoria on November 19. The next day, he will be addressing three rallies in Balrampur, Basti and Gorakhpur before heading to Jaunpur, Ballia and Mau on November 21. His next stop will be at Varanasi, the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on November 22.
On November 23, Ygoi will address rallies in Shahajahanpur, Farrukhabad and Kannauj. On Novembner 24, he will address rallies in Jhansi, Fatehpur and lucknow. The next day, he will go to Barabanki, lakhimpur and Bareilly and on November 26, he will be visiting Moradabad and Saharanpur.
The three-phase polls will be held on November 22, 26 and 29 while the votes will be counted on December 1.
Meanwhile, the BJP hit out at the Samajwadi Party for terming its manifesto fake.
BJP state general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak said that opposition parties had no courage to present their manifestos before the people.
“The 28-point Sankalp Patra of BJP makes the voters think about what they will get if they support us. The SP and BSP have no such commitment as they are just trying to confuse the people to get votes,” he told reporters in Meerut on Monday.
It may be pointed out that SP president Akhilesh Yadav had tweeted that BJP had announced a ‘chaal patra’ for civic polls. Pathak also questioned if senior leaders of the opposition parties were scared of campaigning. “They (opposition parties) know that they will suffer a humiliating defeat in the elections, hence they are not ready to campaign for their candidates,” he said.
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