 "PM Modi began his 45-hour long meditation at Kanniyakumari’s Vivekananda Rock Memorial")
The last day of a grueling 75-day long election campaign for the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies -- the longest and hottest in Independent India’s history -- had star campaigners of their respective parties continue with addressing rallies, attending road shows, and trading accusations. But the top leaders of these parties found time to spend at least a part of their day offering prayers at temples and gurudwaras.
The model code of conduct kicked in on March 16. As the campaigning ended for the seventh and final phase of the Lok Sabha polls, the PM began his 45-hour long meditation at Kanniyakumari’s Vivekananda Rock Memorial. After arriving from nearby Thiruvananthapuram by a helicopter, Modi worshipped at the Bhagavathi Amman temple and reached the rock memorial by a ferry service and started meditation that is scheduled to go on till June 1. The monument was built in tribute to Swami Vivekananda, who meditated over the rocks inside the sea towards the end of 1892. Modi had mediated in a Kedarnath cave following the end of campaign in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, and now picked a spiritually significant site in the southernmost tip of the country.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah offered prayers at the Kashi Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi, the Lok Sabha constituency of the PM, which is scheduled for polling on Saturday along with 56 other seats in the Phase-VII of the Lok Sabha polls. J P Nadda, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national president, visited a temple in Himachal Pradesh’s Bilaspur and Anandpur Sahib, the holiest Sikh pilgrimage site. Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, along with her daughter, visited the Jakhu Temple in Shimla.
The last day of campaigning had its share of political point scoring. It saw the entry of former Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, who is ailing and had kept away from campaigning, into the election discourse.
In an open letter to Punjabis, Singh said of Prime Minister Modi that “no PM in the past has uttered such hateful, unparliamentary, and coarse terms, meant to target either a specific section of the society or the Opposition.”
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Addressing a public rally in Hoshiarpur, the PM cautioned the Opposition INDIA bloc leaders. “I am silent but you should not make a mistake in understanding Modi... The day Modi opens his mouth, he will bring out the sins of your seven generations,” he said. The PM said the Congress “strangled” the Constitution during the Emergency and accused the Congress of making the Agnipath scheme a “weapon of politics” and said there cannot be a “bigger sin than this”.
The PM also posted on social media a nearly six-minute long video, where speaking in Bhojpuri, he appealed to the voters of his Varanasi constituency to create a record of voting on June 1 for the creation of a developed India along with Nav Kashi (new Kashi).
In a video message to Congress workers and supporters, Rahul Gandhi congratulated the "lions" of party workers and those of the INDIA bloc for the fight they have put up in the battle to save the country’s Constitution and institutions. He asked them to keep an eye until the counting day on the strong rooms that store the electronic voting machines.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took part in a roadshow from Jadavpur to Kalighat in Kolkata, while her Delhi counterpart Arvind Kejriwal was in Patiala, attending a roadshow. All the seats in Punjab and Himachal, along with the remainder of the seats in West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and the Union Territory of Chandigarh are scheduled to vote on Saturday.
Banerjee said it was a possibility, if the counting procedures were conducted properly, the BJP would not come to power this time. In Bihar, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)’s Tejashwi Yadav pointed to Bihar CM Nitish Kumar’s absence from the election campaign in recent days, suggesting that a big churn in the state politics was in the offing after the counting of votes on June 4. In Odisha, CM Naveen Patnaik told a news agency that the people of the state would decide upon his successor.
However, the day was also for the publicity teams of the leading political parties to put out data of how hard their respective leaders had worked during the course of the campaign. BJP sources said that PM Modi’s public engagement included attending 206 public meetings and road shows and giving 80 interviews.
The Congress’ team released a video from Wednesday of Rahul Gandhi meeting the family of “Agniveer martyr” Ajay Singh in Punjab. It said that Rahul Gandhi attended 107 public meetings and interactions with people, while Priyanka was a part of 108 meetings and road shows, highlighting the 10 days she campaigned in Amethi.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge concluded his campaign with a press conference in the national capital. He pointed out the “divisive nature” of the PM’s campaign. Kharge said that the PM mentioned “mandir-masjid” on 421 occasions in his public speeches and Muslims and minorities on 224 occasions but the Election Commission did not take notice.
