Elections to 96 parliamentary constituencies, almost half of which are with the BJP, will be held in the fourth phase of the ongoing Lok Sabha polls on Monday.
Assembly polls for all the 175 seats in Andhra Pradesh and 28 seats in Odisha will also be conducted simultaneously.
The fourth phase comes at a time when the Election Commission (EC) has confronted the Congress over doubts of electoral manipulation being raised by a section of the INDIA bloc and civil society.
The Opposition has also accused the poll body of going soft on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders for their repeated communal remarks during the past phases of polling.
So far, the EC has not spoken about any action on the complaints or whether the BJP and the Congress had responded to notices sent to them for comments made by Modi and Rahul Gandhi in the previous polling phases.
The 96 seats include 13 in Uttar Pradesh where there appears to be a schism between chief minister Adityanath and the central leadership of the BJP.
AAP leader and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday claimed that his Uttar Pradesh counterpart would lose his job if the BJP is re-elected.
Key candidates in this phase include Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav from Uttar Pradesh’s Kannauj and BJP’s Giriraj Singh from Bihar’s Begusarai.
In Bengal, some of the key candidates are Congress’s Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury from Behrampore, Trinamool’s Mahua Moitra from Krishnanagar and Shatrughan Sinha from Asansol, All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen’s Asaduddin Owaisi from Hyderabad and Congress’s Y.S. Sharmila from Andhra Pradesh’s Kadappa.
Nine states and one Union Territory will go to the polls. In the previous Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won 42 and the Congress had bagged six of these seats.
In Madhya Pradesh’s Indore, the Congress candidate withdrew his nomination at the last moment and joined the BJP.
Although there are 14 candidates still in the fray, including the BJP, BSP and Socialist Unity Centre of India (Communist), the INDIA bloc has asked the voters to choose the None of the Above (NOTA) option.
The Congress in Madhya Pradesh took the stand to protest against uncontested polls allegedly engineered by the BJP, as had recently occurred in Gujarat’s Surat where all candidates except the BJP withdrew their nominations.
In Arunachal Pradesh, too, only BJP candidates filed nominations for the 10 Assembly seats.