Battleground 2024: Polls begin today, Gadkari to Sonowal on the ballot

Assemblies in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh to also hold elections

Polling will take place on 102, or nearly a fifth of a total 543 Lok Sabha seats across 18 states and three Union Territories in phase one of the general elections on Friday. It will be the largest of the seven phases, with Assemblies in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh also going to polls.

Five years ago, of the 102 seats, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had won 40 seats and its then allies another eight. The AIADMK, which won one seat, was then a constituent of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

The Congress and its current allies had bagged 49 seats, with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) accounting for 24 of these and Congress 15. The Bahujan Samaj Party won three, the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha and Mizo National Front won a seat each.

The 1,625 contestants include only 134 women candidates -- a little over eight per cent. The electorate will decide the fate of eight Union ministers, including Nitin Gadkari and Bhupender Yadav, two former chief ministers, BJP’s Sarbananda Sonowal, who is also a Union minister and Biplab Deb, and ex-governor Tamilisai Soundararajan.

 

The polling for phase one will mark the conclusion of elections in Tamil Nadu -- where the BJP is leading a rainbow coalition in its effort to make it a three-cornered contest -- and in Uttarakhand.

As for the rest, 12 of Rajasthan’s 25 seats will see polling, including in the Shekhawati region, where the Congress and its allies believe they stand a better chance to defeat the BJP than five years ago.

All the seats in Arunachal, Sikkim, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram will go to polls. In Manipur, only part of the Outer Manipur seat will have polling, with the remainder scheduled for April 26. 

Western Uttar Pradesh’s eight seats will see polling where the BJP had performed relatively poorly five years last time, with the BSP-Samajwadi Party alliance accounting for four seats. The state is set for a three-cornered contest this time.

Five years ago, the parties that now constitute the Opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) secured 41.7 per cent of the votes polled while the NDA secured 34 per cent vote share.

The phase one of the Lok Sabha polls will also be the largest of its seven phases with voting also to be held for 82 assembly seats, including for Arunachal Pradesh’s 60-member legislature and Sikkim’s 32-member legislature on Friday.

With no candidates other than the BJP’s in the fray in 10 of Arunachal’s 60 Assembly constituencies, voting will be held on 50 seats.

Some of the prominent candidates in phase one are Union ministers Nitin Gadkari from Nagpur, Kiren Rijiju from Arunachal West, Arjun Ram Meghwal from Bikaner, Sonowal from Dibrugarh, Sanjeev Baliyan from Muzaffarnagar, Jitendra Singh from Udhampur and Bhupendra Yadav from Alwar. Soundararajan, who recently resigned as governor of Telangana and Lt Governor of Puducherry, is the BJP’s candidate from Chennai South Lok Sabha constituency.

Nakul Nath, son of Congress leader and former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Nath, is seeking re-election from Chhindwara, DMK’s K Kanimozhi from Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi and former Union minister A Raja from Nilgiris.

 

The Election Commission on Thursday said it has deployed over 1.8 million polling personnel across 187,000 polling stations where over 166.3 million (16.63 crore) voters will exercise their franchise, including 84 million men, 82.3 million women and 11,371 third gender.

There are as many as 3.56 million first time voters, besides 35.1 million voters in the 20-29 year age cohort. The EC has also put into service 41 helicopters, 84 special trains and nearly 100,000 vehicles to ferry polling and security personnel.