Phase 5: Rae Bareli, Lucknow among 49 Lok Sabha seats to vote on Monday

The Election Commission on Sunday said 89.5 million electors would be eligible to cast their voters on the 49 seats. Simultaneous polling for 35 Assembly seats will be held in Odisha

Forty-nine Lok Sabha constituencies across eight states and Union Territories, including high-stakes seats of Union ministers Piyush Goyal in Mumbai North, Rajnath Singh in Lucknow, and Smriti Irani in Amethi, and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in Rae Bareli, will vote on Monday in Phase-V of the elections.

Mumbai, Thane, and Lucknow are the seats known for urban voter apathy. The Election Commission (EC) has “specially” called upon “these city-dwellers to erase the stigma by turning out in higher numbers”.

Five years ago, the Congress won only one of these seats, Uttar Pradesh’s Rae Bareli, while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) bagged 32, its ally, the undivided Shiv Sena, won seven, and Bihar partners -- Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) and Janata Dal (United) -- secured a seat each. The Trinamool Congress won four, and the Biju Janata Dal two.

The EC on Sunday said 89.5 million electors would be eligible to cast their votes in these constituencies. Simultaneous polling for 35 Assembly seats will be held in Odisha. The EC said the average voter turnout in the first four phases of the Lok Sabha polls had been 66.95 per cent, with 451 people having already voted. The average voter turnout was 67.4 per cent for all seven phases in 2019.

For the 49 seats set to poll on Monday, the average voter turnout in 2019 was 61.34 per cent. Of the 543 seats, 379 seats, or 70 per cent, have already voted, and with voting completed on Monday evening for Phase-V, 79 per cent of the seats will have voted.

The states and UTs slated for polling in Phase-V are Bihar (5 seats), Jammu and Kashmir’s Baramulla and Ladakh, Jharkhand (3), Maharashtra (13), Uttar Pradesh (14), Odisha (5), and West Bengal (7). In 2019, the BJP won 13 of UP’s 14 seats, all three of Jharkhand’s, six of Maharashtra’s, with the Shiv Sena winning the remaining seven, and three each in Odisha and Bengal.

Other key candidates in the fray include Ujwal Nikam (Mumbai North Central), Kalyan Banerjee (Srerampore), Lallu Singh (Faizabad), and Chirag Paswan (Hajipur). In Odisha’s Sundargarh, former Indian hockey team captain Dilip Tirkey will take on BJP’s Jual Oram. In Bihar’s Saran, the contest is between BJP’s Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Rohini Acharya, the daughter of former Bihar CM Lalu Prasad. In UP’s Kaiserganj, the BJP has fielded sitting MP and former Wrestling Federation of India chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh’s son Karan Bhushan.

Polling on 49 seats

89.5 million electorate

94,732 polling stations