UP Bypolls: With Congress, BSP Out Of Contest, BJP And SP To Vie For Mainpuri, Rampur, Khatauli Seats

Polling will be held on Monday from 7 am to 6 pm. The results will be declared on December 8, as per the state election office.

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New Delhi: Bypolls will be held in one Lok Sabha and two assembly constituencies – Mainpuri parliamentary seat, Rampur Sadar and Khatauli – in Uttar Pradesh today, December 5. With neither the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) nor the Congress contesting the seats, the fight would be between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) combine.

Here are the key points:

• Polling will be held on Monday from 7 am to 6 pm. The results will be declared on December 8, as per the state election office.
• While the byelection to the Mainpuri parliamentary seat is being held due to the demise of SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav, in Rampur Sadar and in Khatauli, assembly bypolls were necessitated after SP MLA Azam Khan and BJP MLA Vikram Singh Saini were disqualified after their conviction in different cases.
• SP leader Azam Khan was disqualified after a court awarded him three years imprisonment in a 2019 hate speech case. BJP’s Vikram Singh Saini lost his membership after his conviction in a 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots case. 
• In the Mainpuri seat, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s elder daughter-in-law and SP chief Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav is pitted against BJP’s Raghuraj Singh Shakya. 
• It is to be noted that the BJP candidate was once a close associate of Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party chief and Akhilesh Yadav’s uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav. Shakya joined the saffron party ahead of the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls held earlier this year.
• The BJP in Rampur Sadar has fielded Akash Saxena. Saxena is the son of former party MLA Shiv Bahadur Saxena. He will be contesting against senior SP leader Azam Khan’s protege Asim Raja.
• In the Khautali seat, the contest would be between Vikram Singh Saini’s wife Rajkumari Saini and Madan Bhaiya from the RLD.
• Notably, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, deputy chief ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brajesh Pathak, and senior leader Bhupendra Chaudhary were among the top campaigners for the saffron party.
• SP chief Akhilesh Yadav did not campaign for the earlier bypolls in Azamgarh and the Rampur parliamentary seats. However, he led an aggressive campaign for his wife in Mainpuri.
• RLD chief Jayant Chaudhary stayed put in Khatauli to garner support for his party’s nominee.