C'garh: 23 pc vote turnout till 11 am in Bastar LS seat

Around 23 per cent voters exercised their franchise in the first four hours of polling in the Naxal-hit Bastar Lok Sabha constituency of Chhattisgarh on Thursday.

According to an election official, long queues of voters were seen at several polling booths, including booth no. 220 of Shyamgiri village panchayat in Dantewada district, where a BJP MLA and four security personnel were killed in a Naxal attack on Tuesday.

"Polling in the Bastar Lok Sabha seat started at 7 am amid tight security and is going on smoothly. Till 11 am, around 23 per cent polling has been registered," he told PTI.

Early in the morning, Naxals detonated an IED (improvised explosive device) in Narayanpur district, which comes under Bastar constituency, police said.

No casualty was reported in the blast.

Nearly 80,000 state and paramilitary personnel have been deployed across the Bastar constituency to ensure smooth and peaceful polling.

Voting in Bastar Lok Sabha constituency's four Assembly segments - Dantewada, Konta, Bijapur and Narayanpur - is being held from 7 am and 3 pm, the official said.

Besides, the voting time in the other four Assembly segments - Bastar, Chitrakot, Kondagaon and Jagdalpur - of the constituency is from 7 am and 5 pm, he said.

Seven candidates are in fray in the seat and as per electoral rolls, there are 13,72,127 voters.

Of the 1,879 polling booths in the constituency, 741 have been marked as hyper-sensitive and 606 as sensitive in view of the threat of Naxalism.

There is a direct contest between Congress' Dipak Baij and senior BJP leader Baiduram Kashyap.

The saffron party has never lost the Bastar seat since 1998.