New Delhi: Ninety-one Lok Sabha constituencies spread across 18 states and two Union Territories, including all seats in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, will go to polls on April 11 in the first phase of the elections. Unions ministers Nitin Gadkari, Kiren Rijiju and VK Singh are among several big names who will contest on Thursday.
All parliamentary constituencies of Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshadweep, Telangana and Uttarakhand will go to polls in this phase. Besides, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir, Maharashtra, Manipur, Odisha, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal will also vote in this phase.
The two Telugu states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are going to polls on Thursday with the Election Commission (EC) making adequate arrangements.
In Andhra Pradesh, strong anti-incumbency, caste and corruption are the major factors that could determine the outcome of the elections to Lok Sabha and the state assembly as over 3.93 crore voters will exercise their franchise. This is the first general election in the state after the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh in 2014.
Telugu Desam Party chief and CM N Chandrababu Naidu will be seeking election from Kuppam, while his son Nara Lokesh is making his electoral debut from Mangalagiri. YSR Congress chief YS Jaganmohan Reddy, an aspirant for the CM's post, is fighting from his family's pocket borough Pulivendula.
There are over 3.93 crore voters, of whom 10 lakh are first-timers. They will exercise their franchise in 46,120 polling stations.
In Telangana, the election will be held for all 17 Lok Sabha seats, in Andhra Pradesh, voters will exercise their franchise to 175 MLAs and 25 MPs.
The Telangana Rashtra Samiti having swept the December assembly polls is hoping for an encore in the company of Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM while the opposition Congress and BJP appear to be focussed on winning a select number of seats. The Nizamabad Lok Sabha constituency is a special case as 185 candidates, including over 170 farmers, are in the fray.
Telangana has over 2.96 crore voters who would decide the fate of 443 candidates. Of them, over 170 are farmers from Nizamabad who have entered the fray to highlight their plight.
Over 79,000 EVMs, 42,000 control units, 46,000 Voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT)s are being used for the election for which 2 lakh officials have been deployed across 34,604 polling stations.
In Uttar Pradesh on eight seats, the ruling BJP will clash with the newly-formed SP-BSP-RLD alliance across Ghaziabad, Gautam Buddh Nagar, Baghpat, Saharanpur, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Bijnor and Kairana constituencies.
Muzaffarnagar will see RLD chief Ajit Singh take on BJP's Sanjeev Balyan. His son Jayant Chaudhary is fielded against Union minister Satyapal Singh in Baghpat. Union ministers V K Singh and Mahesh Sharma are BJP candidates in Ghaziabad and Gautam Budh Nagar, respectively.
In Bihar, four Lok Sabha seats, Gaya, Aurangabad, Jamui and Nawada, will see polling on tomorrow. LJP leader Chirag Paswan is contesting from Jamui reserved seat. He is the sitting MP and is locked in a virtual straight contest with Bhudeo Chaudhary of RLSP.
In the North East, of the two seats in Arunachal Pradesh Union Minister Kiren Rijiju is seeking re-election from Arunachal West. Four seats in Assam will go to polls, with former CM Tarun Gogoi's son Gaurav Gogoi testing poll waters from Kaliabor. In Meghalaya, polling will be held tomorrow for two Lok Sabha Parliamentary seats- Shillong and Tura.
Sikkim Assembly elections of 32 seats will be held simultaneously with lone parliament seat of the state tomorrow.
In West Bengal, all arrangements have been made for free and fair polling in Cooch Behar and Alipurduar Lok Sabha Seats tomorrow.
The lone Parliamentary Constituency of Andaman and Nicobar Islands will go to polls tomorrow in the first phase of General Elections 2019. A total of 15 candidates are in the fray for the lone seat of Andaman and Nicobar Parliamentary Constituency.
The fate of all the candidates would be known on May 23 after the seven-phase election across the country comes to an end.
Comments
0 comment