UP polls 2022: Yogi Adityanath set to win Gorakhpur seat with massive margin

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yogi Adityanath is poised to win Gorakhpur Urban seat with a massive margin of over 50,000 votes. His victory comes as the BJP is on course to retain power in Uttar Pradesh. The counting of the votes polled in assembly elections is underway.

According to the Election Commission of India, Adityanath, who is contesting the Assembly elections for the first time, received 85,356 while his nearest rival SP candidate Subhawati Upendra Dutt Shukla got 30,498 votes. Azad Samaj Party chief Chandra Shekhar Azad garnered only 4,501 votes.

Adityanath represented the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat until 2017 when he was chosen as the UP Chief Minister after the Bharatiya Janata Party's landslide victory in the state polls. The Gorakhpur Sadar seat had also been a bastion of the BJP, which the party had never lost since 1967 since the days of the Jan Sangh. 

As CM, he took decisions that confirmed his image as a Hindutva mascot. Early in his term, he banned illegal slaughterhouses and the police cracked down on cow slaughter.

His government brought an ordinance and later a bill against religious conversion through force or deceit, a move that also seemed to target interfaith marriages. Other BJP-ruled states followed the UP example, coming up with their versions of the law.

Briefly, last year, there was speculation that the BJP wanted to replace Adityanath as chief minister. But the rumours died down with top leaders saying that he needed to be back as CM in 2022 if the party sought to return to power at the Centre in 2024. Party leaders hailed the Adityanath-Narendra Modi 'double-engine' government in the state.

The BJP's 2022 assembly election win may have further consolidated his stock in the party. The saffron party is now set to win the UP state polls twice in a row, a feat achieved by no other party in three decades.

Meanwhile, according to the latest trends of the Election Commission of India as the counting of the votes is underway, the BJP has 13 seats and is leading in 237 constituencies. The Samajwadi Party is leading on 116 seats and Congress leading only in two constituencies. 

(With agency inputs)