UP Polls: Akhilesh Yadav to face BJP's Union minister SP Singh Baghel in Karhal

Lucknow: Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav will face Union Minister SP Singh Baghel on Karhal seat of Mainpuri where both of them filed nominations on Monday.

After filing his nomination papers, the SP chief said the UP assembly elections will write the country's history for the next century and appealed to people to defeat the negative politics. Yadav said his "mission" is to do positive politics with progressive thinking.

"This nomination is a mission as this UP election will write the country's history for the next century. Let us take part in this movement of positive politics with progressive thinking. Defeat negative politics, remove it. Jai Hind!," Yadav said in a Hindi tweet.

He also shared a picture of his departure for Mainpuri from his native place Saifai in Etawah on a Samajwadi Vijay Rath bus.

The Karhal assembly seat which is just is just four kilometres from Saifai, the native village of SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav is part of the Mainpuri parliamentary constituency represented by Mulayam. The constituency will go to the polls on February 20 in the third of the seven-phase elections in the state.

Shortly after Akhilesh Yadav filed his nomination, Union minister SP Singh Baghel also reached the Mainpuri collectorate and filed his nomination papers to take on the Samajwadi party chief on the high-profile seat which also ended speculation about Aparna Yadav challenging the SP president on this high-profile seat.

Asked recently about chances of her challenging his brother-in-law Akhilesh Yadav on this seat, SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav's daughter-in-law Aparna Yadav had said she would follow the party's directions and that led to the speculation.

Baghel who is the Lok Sabha MP from Agra (SC) constituency, is the Union minister of state for Law and Justice. Sixty-one-year-old Baghel is also an associate professor in military science.

A fourth-term MP, he was earlier a Cabinet minister in the UP government, handling the departments of Animal Husbandry and Fisheries, and Minor Irrigation and Underground Water.

The Karhal assembly constituency has been with the SP since 1993, except for 2002. In the 2002 Assembly polls, sitting MLA Sobaran Singh had contested on the BJP ticket. Thereafter, he joined the SP and won three times consecutively.

Karhal has about 3.7 lakh electorate, including 1.4 lakh (37 per cent) Yadavs, 34,000 Shakhyas (OBCs) and around 14,000 Muslims.

Meanwhile, BSP has fielded Kuldeep Narayan, a schedule caste member, from the Karhal assembly constituency.