New Delhi: The first phase of the UP assembly elections for 73 seats takes off in the state’s 15 western districts on Saturday. The contest here — unlike the rest of the state — is four-cornered.

Elsewhere in UP most seats have the SP-Congress alliance, BJP and BSP as key contenders. But the presence of Ajit Singh’s RLD adds another dimension to the fight in west UP, a stretch known for its industries and agriculture.

In the 2012 assembly polls, SP and BSP won 24 west UP seats each, the BJP had 11. RLD bagged nine and the Congress five. The vote here had catapulted BJP towards a landslide victory in UP in the 2014 LS polls, and could reflect the trend in the rest of UP.

If there’s one issue that no party has adequately addressed, it’s the farm distress — which has turned caste equations on its head. Farmers say they are united in their suffering.

The BJP began its campaign here by raking up Ram Mandir and the Kairana “exodus”. Soon it began underplaying these “polarising” issues. Probably because they got no traction. In Kairana, the refrain TOI heard was: “Everyone lost after the 2013 Muzaffarnagar violence.” The party’s riot-accused faces, Sangeet Som, Suresh Rana and Sanjiv Balyan, star campaigners of 2014, were battling fires on their home turfs and remained tied to their constituencies.

Demonetisation and the surgical strikes, billed as the Narendra Modi government’s achievements, barely found mention. The BJP fell back on UP’s “poor” law and order, its seniors quoting crime figures disputed by the state government.