New Delhi:
Voters from 49 constituencies across 6 states and 2 Union Territories will decide the fates of many key leaders today — Union Ministers and party chiefs. Among those in fray are Smriti Irani, Rahul Gandhi, Chirag Paswan and Omar Abdullah.
Here are the Top 10 points in this big story:
Voting will be held for five seats in Bihar, Jharkhand (3), Maharashtra (13), Odisha (5), UP (14), West Bengal (7) and two Union Territories – Jammu and Kashmir (1) and Ladakh (1). With this phase, election will be over in Maharashtra and Ladakh.
Voting will be held for 35 seats of the Odisha Assembly and 21 Lok Sabha seats as part of the simultaneous polling in the state.
While this phase has the least number of seats, most are high-profile constituencies from where Union Ministers and leaders of national and regional parties are contesting. In 2019, the BJP won 32 of the 49 seats.
The big fight is expected in the seven seats of Bengal and the 13 seats of Maharashtra. Ten of the 13 seats are in the Shiv Sena stronghold and the clash will be between two factions of the party, led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and his predecessor Uddhav Thackeray.
In Bengal, a tough fight is on the cards on several seats, with Congress and CPM muscling into what was expected to be a straight fight between the BJP and the ruling Trinamool Congress.
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP had won 13 of the 14 seats going to polls today — the exception being Raebareli, won by Sonia Gandhi.
The list of key candidates include Union Ministers Piyush Goyal (Mumbai North), Bharati Pawar (Dindori), Smriti Irani (Amethi), Rajnath Singh (Lucknow). Among key allies are Lok Janshakti Party-Ram Vilas chief Chirag Paswan (Hajipur), Shrikant Shinde, son of Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde (Kalyan).
From the Opposition, Congress’s Rahul Gandhi is defending his mother Sonia Gandhi’s bastion Raebareli after she moved onto Rajya Sabha; RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav’s daughter Rohini Acharya is contesting against BJP’s former Union Minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy from Saran; Shiv Sena-UBT leader and former Union Minister Arvind Sawant is contesting from Mumbai South.
In Jammu and Kashmir’s Baramulla, former Chief Minister and National Conference chief Omar Abdullah faces the PDP’s Faiyaz A Mir, People’s Conference chief Sajad Ghani Lone, and Awami Ittehad Party chief, the jailed Engineer Rashid.
The next and penultimate phase, comprising 58 seats, will be held on May 25. National capital Delhi and neighbouring Haryana will join in for a single-phase polling. The counting of votes will be held on June 4 after the last phase of the election ends on June 1.
