Home minister Amit Shah and defence minister Rajnath Singh are scheduled to visit Uttar Pradesh on Friday, with an aim to target upcoming assembly elections early next year. Amit Shah will be in Varanasi for two days, where he will address a meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) assembly in-charges and district chiefs.

Rajnath Singh will spend three days in Lucknow, his own Lok Sabha constituency, where he will meet with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to discuss a defence corridor project in the state. Singh is also expected to inspect construction projects, attend a number of inaugurations, and unveil the statue of former Lucknow mayor Akhilesh Das. Meetings with party cadres will be held by the defence minister.

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Amit Shah will meet with party functionaries in Varanasi to discuss plans for the 2022 assembly elections, and then lay the foundation stone for a university in Azamgarh, the Lok Sabha constituency of Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav, on Saturday. 

He will travel from the Varanasi airport to the Pt Deendayal Upadhyay Trade Facilitation Centre (TFC) on Friday to attend a meeting. Furthermore, he will  spend the night in Varanasi before attending an All-India official language conference at TFC at 10 am on Saturday. Later in the afternoon, he will visit Azamgarh. 

CM Yogi Adityanath will be present when the home minister lays the foundation stone of a university in Azamgarh. There would also be a public meeting addressed by Shah.

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After gaining power in Uttar Pradesh in 2017, the BJP promised to build a university in Azamgarh. 

Political analyst Kaushal Kishore Mishra, a professor in the department of political science at Banaras Hindu University, told Hindustan Times, “The people of Azamgarh have been demanding the university since the mid-70s when Ram Naresh Yadav was the chief minister of UP. Different political parties came to power in UP over the past four decades, but the demand remained unfulfilled. Now, the BJP government is going to fulfill the demand.”