Uttar Pradesh Elections 2022 Updates: FIR lodged against Samajwadi Party workers for violation of Covid norms

Bringing the curtains down on the suspense over their next political journey, rebel cabinet minister Swami Prasad Maurya along with at least 8 MLAs, who recently resigned from the BJP, called on Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Thursday evening. The development came close to Maurya taking to Twitter to compare RSS and BJP with cobra and snake to state that he will finish the two like a mongoose.

The most recent political entrant on the social media platform, the BSP is now learning the tricks of the trade when it comes to getting visibility. Forced to campaign virtually and even as party chief Mayawati is learnt to have told party members that most of its supporters are not on social media and they need to focus on newspapers for the campaign, the party has managed to get two hashtags trending since last week.

From cobra to nevala (mongoose), double engine to daggaamaar vaahan (rickety vehicle), unique metaphors were used in the political slugfest on Twitter over the defection of more than a dozen MLAs to Samajwadi Party, leaving netizens in splits.

While the question whether Congress general secretary and UP in-charge Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will contest the state assembly elections remains unanswered, the grand old party released its first list of 125 candidates on Thursday.

The Bharatiya Janata Party is likely to release its first list of candidates for UP elections on January 15. A high-level meeting of the party leaders on Thursday in Delhi finalized discussion on 172 seats. These seats were mostly from the first three phases of the polls, sources told TOI.

Putting their bet on the belief that farmers’ agitation in Western UP has narrowed down the gap between the Jats and Muslims created by the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, the Samajwadi Party and RLD kept the focus on Jats and Muslims in the first list of 29 candidates — 10 SP and 19 of RLD — that the two parties jointly released on Thursday.

After Swami Prasad Maurya and Dara Singh Chauhan, another UP minister, Dharam Singh Saini, resigned from the Yogi Adityanath cabinet setting a fresh round of unease in the saffron camp on Thursday.