The first candidate to declare opposition to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in Gorakhpur was Bhim Army Chief of Staff Chandrashekhar Azad.
The Dalit leader had earlier said he would run against Yogi Adityanath in the February-March elections. The official announcement from his party came just days after the BJP announced that Yogi Adityanath would contest in the UP elections in Gorakhpur Sadar. Yogi Adityanath is running for MLA for the first time. But his main rival will be the yet-to-be-announced Samajwadi party candidate.

This will also be the first election for Chandrashekhar Azad.

The 34-year-old rose to prominence after announcing in 2019 that he would run against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He later explained that since he had no political party at the time, it was better to support Mayawati’s party and Congress.

Now that he has one, he will take Yogi Adityanath, he said.

“It doesn’t matter to me to win a spot at the UP convention. What matters to me is that Yogi Adityanath shouldn’t be in the convention. So I’ll race wherever he’s competing,” he said last year. Bhim army chief and his party have no bases in Gorakhpur or even in eastern Uttar Pradesh. The Gorakhpur Sadar parliamentary seat has been in the hands of the BJP since 1989, but was once won by Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha. In 2017, BJP’s Radha Mohan Das Agarwal won the seat by more than 60,000 votes.

Chandrashekhar Azad recently announced that his party would not ally with Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi party after seat-share talks collapsed.

He claimed he felt cheated by the Samajwadi  party and that it had broken a promise to give his party 25 seats to contest.

Akhilesh Yadav said he would try to secure two seats for Azad’s party, but he was told Bhim’s army chief was no longer interested.

The Bhim army led by Chandrashekhar Azad drew attention in May 2017 during clashes between Saharan Burdalits and upper caste Thakurs.

Complete News Source : NDTV