Lok Sabha Elections: Stage location for fifth phase, several bigwigs in fray

Photo: IANS

Lok Sabha Elections: Stage location for fifth phase, several bigwigs in fray

With Lok Sabha elections intelligent against its final phases, nearly 9 crore voters in 49 seats, spanning Ladakh’s lunar-treasure terrain to Odisha’s rolling uplands, and from UP’s Awadh and Bundelkhand to bustling Mumbai and its surroundings, will on Monday seal the destiny of 695 candidates, including bigwigs treasure Union Ministers Rajnath Singh, Piyush Goyal, and Smriti Irani, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi and NC’s Omar Abdullah.

Polling in the fifth phase covers 49 seats in six states – Bihar (5), Jharkhand (3), Maharashtra (13), Odisha (5), UP (14), West Bengal (7) and two Union Territories – Jammu and Kashmir (1) and Ladakh (1). Vote casting for 35 seats of the Odisha Assembly can even be held in the impart’s 2d phase of simultaneous polling.

Basically based totally on the Election Commission, around 9.47 lakh polling officers had been deployed to facilitate the exercise of franchise by 8.95 crore voters – 4.69 crore males, 4.26 crore females and 5,409 third-gender – across 94,732 polling stations.

Of the voters, over 7.81 lakh are over 85 years vulnerable, 24,792 are above 100 years and 7.03 lakh are PwD.

“Polling stations are ready to welcome the voters with huge shade, drinking water, ramps, toilets and other total products and providers to be sure that polling takes space in a contented and stable ambiance. The fervent CEOs/DEOs and Bid machineries had been knowledgeable to elevate end passable measures to elevate a watch on sizzling weather stipulations in areas, where it is forecast,” the EC acknowledged in a assertion.

Whereas the fifth phase has the least option of seats in the total phases, all these are high-profile seats from where top Union Ministers and leaders of nationwide and regional parties are contesting. These consist of all six seats of Mumbai, as neatly as UP’s Lucknow, Amethi, and Raebareli, and Bihar’s Hajipur and Saran.

Union Minister Piyush Goyal is contesting from Mumbai North, where he faces the Congress’ Bhushan Patil, his ministerial colleague Bharati Pawar is struggling with from Dindori-ST in opposition to NCP-SP’s Bhaskar Bhagare, and Shiv Sena’s Shrikant Shinde, son of Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, is in the fray from Kalyan, in opposition to SS-UBT’s Vaishali Darekar Rane. In Mumbai South, Shiv Sena-UBT chief and vulnerable Union Minister Arvind Sawant faces Shiv Sena’s Yamini Jadhav.

In UP’s Amethi, Union Minister Smriti Irani is eyeing a 2d victory in the erstwhile Gandhi bastion in opposition to family loyalist Kishori Lal Sharma, whereas her 2019 rival Rahul Gandhi has shifted to adjoining Raebareli, held by his mom Sonia Gandhi, and is vying to support it in opposition to BJP’s Dinesh Pratap Singh.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh is contesting again from Lucknow, where he faces the Samajwadi Occasion’s Ravidas Mehrotra.

Every other key contest in UP is Kaiserganj, where sitting MP and vulnerable WFI chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh has stood apart for his son Karan Bhushan Singh, who’s contesting because the BJP candidate in opposition to the SP’s Ram Bhagat Mishra.

In Bihar, RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav’s daughter Rohini Acharya faces off in opposition to BJP candidate and vulnerable Union Minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy in Saran, while Lok Janshakti Occasion-Ram Vilas chief Chirag Paswan will strive in opposition to from his father’s bastion, Hajipur-SC, in opposition to Shiv Charan Ram of the RJD.

In Jammu and Kashmir’s Baramulla, Nationwide Conference Vice President and vulnerable Chief Minister Omar Abdullah faces the PDP’s Faiyaz A. Mir, Individuals’s Conference chief Sajad Ghani Lone, and Awami Ittehad Occasion chief, the jailed Engineer Rashid.

There are about a involved contests on the playing cards in West Bengal too – particularly in Hooghly, where Trinamool Congress candidate and TV anchor Rachna Banerjee faces actress-grew to develop to be-politician Locket Chatterjee of the BJP, and Howrah, where sitting Trinamool MP and vulnerable footballer Prasun Bannerjee confronts CPI-M’s Sabyasachi Chatterjee and BJP’s Rathin Chakraborty. Then, in Barrackpore, sitting MP Arjun Singh, who’s abet in the BJP after a shot at rejoining the Trinamool faces Trinamool’s Partha Bhowmick.

With the fifth phase, Maharashtra and Ladakh would possibly be a part of the states and Union Territories where the polling process has concluded.

The next and penultimate phase, comprising 58 seats, is slated to be held on Also can merely 25, with Haryana and Delhi becoming a member of in for a single-phase polling.

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