UP Polls: Month long battle concludes at the bank of river Ganga, campaign ends

Lucknow: The month long tireless efforts of political leaders rested on Monday with the end of campaign for the seventh and last phase of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.

Being the last chance of attracting the electorate to their favour, the election campaigns today were the 'do or die' situation for the politicos in the state. The seventh phase of the electoral battle, which will conclude on the banks of river Ganga, will be the vital one for the Bharatiya Janata Party, for Varanasi being the Lok Sabha constituency of the Prime Minister himself.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has aggressively participated in the BJP rallies, will hold his last road show for the 2017 assembly elections in the Kashi where he would be visiting the house of former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and will hold a rally in Rohaniya afterwards.

The eastern UP fight:

• The saffron party, which is locked in a tight electoral battle with the SP-Congress alliance and the Mayawati-led BSP, hopes that a good performance in the eastern parts of the state will take it past the majority mark in the 403-member state Assembly.
• Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and SP chief Akhilesh Yadav and his alliance partner Congress VP Rahul Gandhi have also been campaigning extensively in the parliamentary constituency of the PM. The two leaders almost crossed path with the PM while holding road shows to garner maximum votes to their favour.
• The Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati has also toured various eastern constituencies of the state ton attract the Muslim electorate to her favour.

Major districts of the last phase:

• Apart from Varanasi the focus would also be at three Naxal-affected districts of Sonbhadra, Mirzapur and Chandauli.

The polling:

• It could be mentioned that the last phase of polling will be held in seven districts, namely, Ghazipur, Varanasi, Chandauli, Mirzapur, Bhadohi, Sonbhadra and Jaunpur.
• A total of 1.41 crore voters, including 64.76 lakh females will exercise their franchise in the last phase to decide the fate of 535 candidates.
• This phase has a number of 40 candidates from BSP, 32 of BJP, 31 of SP, 9 of Congress, 21 of RLD and 5 of NCP.
• A number of 14,458 polling booths have been set up in this phase.
• It could be recalled that in the 2012 state Assembly polls, out of these 40 seats, 23 went to SP, 5 to BSP, 4 to BJP, 3 to Congress and 5 to others.
• The 2017 assembly elections will end on March 8 with the last phase of polling and the results would be declared at March 11.