Second round of LS elections will feature three-cornered contests in eight seats in UP on Friday

Second round of LS elections will feature three-cornered contests in eight seats in UP on Friday

There will be voting on Friday in eight seats in Uttar Pradesh: Amroha, Meerut, Baghpat, Ghaziabad, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Bulandshahr, Aligarh, and Mathura.

Wednesday night marked the conclusion of the second phase of the election campaigning, during which leaders of all the main political parties canvassed the seats to win support for their respective candidates.

In eight of Uttar Pradesh's Lok Sabha seats that will vote in the second round on Friday, there will be a three-cornered race. With the elections spread over seven phases, about 65.5% of voters participated in the first round of the 102 seat election, which took place last Friday throughout 21 states and Union territory.

Wednesday night marked the conclusion of the second phase of the election campaigning, during which leaders of all the main political parties canvassed the seats to win support for their respective candidates. There will be voting on Friday in eight seats in Uttar Pradesh, namely Amroha, Meerut, Baghpat, Ghaziabad, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Bulandshahr, Aligarh, and Mathura.

Arun Govil, who portrayed Lord Rama in the popular TV series Ramayan, and actor-turned-politician Hema Malini, who is running for a third term from Mathura, are two of the 91 candidates whose fates will be determined in the second round. The saffron party, which hails from Meerut, has put him forward. Danish Ali from the Congress, and Atul Garg and Mahesh Sharma from the BJP, visited their respective seats in search of support from the public.

There are 80 parliamentary seats in Uttar Pradesh overall, and voting will occur in each of the seven Lok Sabha election phases. A three-cornered struggle is likely with the NDA, the INDIA alliance, and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) putting up their candidates.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath spearheaded the BJP's second round of campaigning. While Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, BSP president Mayawati, and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) head Jayant Singh have been touring these seats in a flurry of campaigning over the last few days, Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav is leading the campaign.

At an election rally in Aligarh, a constituency with a sizable Muslim population, the prime minister set the tone for the campaign on Monday by accusing the Congress of preparing to redistribute the people's property if it is voted to power. He stopped short of saying that the wealth would go to Muslims, though. Modi said that the opposition Congress and the SP were pursuing an appeasement strategy while doing nothing to improve the socioeconomic standing of the local population.

"Speaking wrong things about a particular community by calling it is an insult to that community spread across the world," Yadav said in a jab at the BJP. The same day, Mayawati accused the BJP of claiming credit for the BSP's growth of the Noida and Greater Noida area when the party was in power in the state at a vote rally in Bulandshahr.

The BJP, which is in power, has a lot on the line since it won seven seats out of the eight constituencies that will be voting in the 2019 elections, while the BSP won Amroha. In these eight Lok Sabha seats, there are 1.67 crore voters, of whom 90.11 lakh are male, 77.38 lakh are female, and 787 belong to the third gender.

These seats have a total of 17,677 voting booths and 7,797 polling stations.