Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections 2017 Phase 3: State prepares for battle of bigwigs

The fate of several sitting and former MLAs, as well as heavyweight candidates, will be sealed in this phase of the elections.

Akhilesh Yadav has asked Amitabh Bachchan not to promote "Gujarat's donkeys".Twitter/Samajwadi Party

The third phase of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections is going to be held on Sunday, February 19, and nearly 2.42 crore voters are expected to seal the fate of 826 candidates, including a lot of bigwigs. It is going to be a tight contest, with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) fielding candidates in all 69 seats, the BJP in 68 seats and the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Congress combine in 65.

Follow: Live updates of UP Assembly polls 2017 Phase 3

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The Sunday election can be considered the halfway mark of sorts in the Assembly elections taking place in February-March this year. The Assembly elections in Punjab, Goa and Uttarakhand are done with, as are the first two phases of the UP polls. After Sunday, there will be four more phases of polling in UP, and two phases of polling in Manipur. The results will be declared after counting on March 15.

What to look out for

On Sunday, the electoral fates of several bigwigs will be sealed in voting across 25,606 polling stations. However, most eyes will be on Mainpuri, which is from where SP ex-chief Mulayam Singh Yadav had contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and defeated his nearest rival by around 3.6 lakh votes. Now that he has been demoted within the party by his own son, it will be interesting to see how candidates from his party fare there.

Also contesting this time is Shivpal Singh, who has been a part of the high-pitched drama between Mulayam and son Akhilesh. There has been talk of Shivpal launching a new party after the elections, but Shivpal himself has refuted the rumours. But this is UP, and anything is possible in politics here, like the SP and the Congress — which were at each other's throats at the beginning of campaigning — not only joining hands, but also apparently having selective amnesia about all the bad things of the other party they had talked about in initial campaigning.