Veteran BJP leader Hridaya Narain Dixit is UP's new assembly speaker

Lucknow: Veteran BJP leader Hridaya Narain Dixit was on Thursday elected unopposed as the speaker of Uttar Pradesh's 17th state assembly.

He had filed his nomination on Wednesday in the presence of Chief Minister Aditya Nath Yogi. 

After a hiatus of more than a decade, Dixit returned to politics in 2016 shortly before the state assembly elections when he was named the chief spokesman of the state unit of the BJP.

He also contested the 2017 assembly elections from Bhagwant Nagar constituency in Unnao and won with a sizeable margin. 

Earlier, Dixit was a parliamentary affairs minister. He first became an MLA in 1985 as an independent.