Campaigning ends in Haryana, Chandigarh

Campaigning for Thursday's Lok Sabha election in Haryana and Chandigarh ended Tuesday evening with leading parties and candidates winding up with road shows in different constituencies.

While Haryana has 10 Lok Sabha seats, Chandigarh has only one seat. Voting for all these seats will be held Thursday (April 10).

There are 230 candidates, including only 10 women, in the fray for the Lok Sabha seats in Haryana. The state has nearly 1.6 crore voters, including 71 lakh women voters, who will decide the fate of these candidates.

The Election Commission has set up 16,244 polling stations this time.

Haryana's chief electoral officer Shrikant Walgad said here Tuesday that campaigning in the 10 Lok Sabha constituencies of Haryana was largely orderly.

"To ensure peaceful conduct of elections and maintenance of law and order, about 44,000 police personnel and home guards and 60 companies of paramilitary forces have been deployed," Walgad said.

The outcome of the election is crucial as Haryana goes in for assembly polls October this year.

The state is witnessing multi-cornered contests on most seats this time. They major parties in the electoral fray are the ruling Congress, main opposition party Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which is in alliance with the Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC), the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

The big names in the fray include billionaire industrialist Naveen Jindal (Congress-Kurukshetra), Deepinder Hooda (Congress-Rohtak), Dushyant Chautala (INLD-Hisar), Kuldeep Bishnoi (HJC-Hisar), Yogendra Yadav (AAP-Gurgaon) and Shruti Chaudhary (Bhiwani-Mahendergarh).

In Chandigarh, over six lakh voters will decide the fate of sitting MP Pawan Kumar Bansal, who has been MP from here in 1991, 1999, 2004 and 2009, and 16 other candidates.

Bansal is being challenged by three women candidates - Kirron Kher (BJP), Gulkirat Kaur Panag (Gul Panag) of AAP and Jannat Jahan-ul-Haq of the BSP.