Direct contest between Congress and BJP for Mayor in 11 corporations of the state on most seats

Amaanullah Usmani

Dehradun. The process of filing nomination papers for the municipal elections has been completed. Both the parties had released the list of their candidates for all the corporations including Dehradun late night. After which the nomination papers of the candidates were filed today. The special thing is that both the parties have tried to balance all the equations.

There are 11 municipal corporation seats in the state, the face-to-face contest has become clear on all the seats. The most interesting contest will be seen on the Dehradun seat. BJP has bet on former state president of Yuva Morcha Saurabh Thapliyal from Dehradun. While Congress has given ticket to Virendra Pokhriyal. Both are new and young faces.

In Uttarakhand, BJP has fielded Saurabh Thapliyal for Dehradun Mayor, Shambhu Paswan for Rishikesh, Anita Devi Agarwal for Roorkee, Gajraj Singh Bisht for Haldwani and Deepak Bali for Kashipur. Kiran Jaisal has been given OBC women candidate from Haridwar, Asha Upadhyay from Srinagar on women’s seat, Shailendra Rawat from Kotdwar on general seat, Kalpana Dewal from Pithoragarh on women’s seat, Ajay Verma from Almora on OBC seat and Vikas Sharma from Rudrapur on general seat for mayor. Congress has given tickets to Virendra Pokhriyal from Dehradun Municipal Corporation, Ranjana Rawat from Kotdwar, Mohan Kheda from Rudrapur, Bhairav Goswami from Almora, Amresh Waliyan from Haridwar, Puja Gupta from Roorkee, Deepak Jatav from Rishikesh and Anju Lunthi from Pithoragarh seat. Elections to 100 municipal bodies, including 11 municipal corporations, 43 municipal councils and 46 nagar panchayats in the state are scheduled to be held on January 23. Voting will be done through ballot papers and the results will be declared on January 25. There are a total of 30,83,500 voters in the state, of which 14,93,519 are women, 15,89,467 are men and 514 are others.