The penultimate phase of the Lok Sabha elections on May 25 will see 58 seats go to the polls, including all seven constituencies in Delhi.
The sixth phase on Saturday covers 11.13 crore people eligible to vote in 1.14 lakh booths in Haryana, Delhi, Bihar, Jharkhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and Bengal. In 2019, the BJP had won 40 of these seats, while the Congress had not won any.
In Bengal, eight seats — Tamluk, Kanthi, Ghatal, Jhargram (ST), Midnapore, Purulia, Bankura and Bishnupur (SC) — will vote on Saturday. The former Calcutta High Court judge, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay, is contesting for the BJP from Tamluk.
He was banned from campaigning for a day because of certain remarks he had made about chief minister Mamata Banerjee.
Cyclone Remal is expected to make landfall in Bengal a day after the polling.
All of Delhi’s seven seats are going to the polls at a time when AAP national convener and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s aide Bibhav Kumar is in jail facing a probe for allegedly assaulting party MP Swati Maliwal.
The BJP, which has held all seven seats for two terms in a row, has cornered the AAP — contesting four seats in alliance with the Congress — over the dignity of women. The INDIA bloc has not fielded any woman candidate in the capital, while the BJP has fielded two.
In North East Delhi, former JNU students’ union president and Congress leader Kanhaiya Kumar faces the BJP’s Manoj Tiwari — a two-term MP from the seat and a Bhojpuri singer-actor. Tiwari is the BJP’s only MP in the capital seeking re-election. The Congress, which is contesting three seats here, had a setback after its Delhi president Arvinder Lovely defected back to the BJP earlier this month.
In Odisha, simultaneous polls will take place in 42 Assembly seats.
Civil society groups supporting the INDIA bloc have formed the Independent Election Observers group to monitor the polls in the capital — the first major election here since the communal riots of 2020 that claimed 53 lives.
Other key candidates in this phase included former chief ministers Manohar Lal Khattar (BJP) in Haryana’s Rohtak and Mehbooba Mufti (People’s Democratic Party) in Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag-Rajouri.
The election in Anantnag-Rajouri was postponed from May 7 despite protests from Opposition parties. The Election Commission had cited “various logistic, communication and natural barriers of connectivity” raised by the BJP, which is not contesting the seat, and some other parties.
Other prominent candidates from the BJP include Maneka Gandhi from Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur, former Union minister Sushma Swaraj’s daughter Bansuri Swaraj from New Delhi, and spokesman Sambit Patra from Puri.
Plea on drought
The Maharashtra government has requested the poll panel for an exemption from the Model Code of Conduct towards drought relief work, including providing drinking water (via tankers) and fodder. The state’s Marathwada region is affected, and polling has concluded in the state. The poll panel has yet to make a statement on this.
