“Yogi’s Dominance In The Gorakhpur Sadar Seat Looks Unchallenged”
Gorakhpur, Feb 4: The Gorakhpur Sadar assembly constituency has become the ‘hot seat’ for the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. This seat has been a center of attraction ever since Chief Minister Yogi was declared as the BJP candidate from here.
On Feb 4, Yogi Adityanath files his nomination papers from the seat. However none of the opposition parties except Chandrashekhar Azad, have announced candidature against CM so far.
Azad had announced to contest against Yogi Adityanath. Political experts feel that the dominance of Yogi Adityanath on the Gorakhpur Sadar seat looks unchallanged even as the polling on this seat is still a few weeks away.
Gorakhpur is the hometown of Adityanath. Besides having won the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat five times, Yogi is also the head priest (Peethadheeshwar) of the Gorakhnath temple in Gorakhpur. This seat has been influenced by the temple itself for many decades.
The votes in favour of Yogi during the previous Lok Sabha elections show that Adityanath continues to remain invincible in the upcoming elections. When it comes to the Goraksh Peeth, all the equations of caste and religion seem to be non-existant. The voters of the area unanimously favour the ‘Yogi’ of which the election figures so far are proof.
In the past 17 elections, the Jan Sangh, the Hindu Mahasabha and the BJP have been victorious 10 times on the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat, formerly known as the Gorakhpur Sadar. The Jana Sangh won one of them under the banner of Janata Party.
The Congress has had six wins in the garb of their former leader, Late Indira Gandhi. For the past three decades, the Indian National Congress has been struggling to match the invincible dominance of the ‘Yogi’.
The SP BSP wagon is still far from sight. Yogi Adityanath won the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat for five consecutive terms in 1998, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. He had been leading by a margin of nearly three times from his nearest rival on Gorakhpur Sadar, one of the assembly segments of Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat, in terms of votes. This is the reason that not only the BJP but also the general public is considering the fight here as a completely a one-sided affair.
In the assembly elections of 1967, 1974, and 1977, the Jana Sangh dominated the Gorakhpur Sadar seat. In the 1977 elections, Jana Sangh was in the fray by becoming a part of the Janata Party. After this, except for the elections of 1980 and 1985, from 1989 till now this seat remained in the favor of the BJP.
Having a look at the votes secured by Yogi Adityanath as MP in the Gorakhpur, there was no competition between Yogi and the candidates of other parties who fought against him. Yogi has been an MP five times. Every time he contested, he got bumper votes from the area. Going by the figures of his last two elections, in the 2009 parliamentary elections, he got 77438 votes out of a total of 122983 votes polled from Gorakhpur Shahr assembly constituency while Vinay Shankar Tiwari of BSP, the runner up, got only 25352 votes. The SP received only 11521 votes here.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the number of votes for Yogi further rose. He got 133892 votes out of a total of 206155 votes polled. The runner-up Rajmati Nishad of SP received 31055 votes and Rambhual Nishad of BSP got only 20479 votes.
