The polling season kicked off with. 58 assembly constituencies across 11 districts in Western Uttar Pradesh went to polls today. 623 candidates including 73 women were in the fray. The BJP had swept Western UP in 2017, winning 53 out of the 58 seats.

However, the landscape has changed since then - the year-long farmer protest, the Adityanath government's handling of the second COVID wave and the polarisation rhetoric are major election issues.

Also, the BJP has also lost a valuable ally in the form of Rakesh Tikait, farmer leader and an influential member of the Jat community. Jat's comprise around 17 to 18 percent of the population in Western UP.

It would be interesting to see how the alliance between Akhilesh Yadav's Samajwadi Party and Jayant Chaudhary's Rashtriya Lok Dal and the Muslim-Jat compact plays out.

CNN-News18's team of reporters get ground report from Muzaffarnagar and Lucknow.

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