Fifty-eight Lok Sabha seats, across seven states and the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag, will vote on Saturday in the penultimate phase of the Lok Sabha elections.
In 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 40 of these, including all the seven in Delhi and 10 in Haryana, and the Congress none. The National Democratic Alliance, led by the BJP, won 45. The BJP’s allies, such as the Janata Dal (United), the Lok Janshakti Party, and the All Jharkhand Students’ Union, got five.
Of the other seats, the Trinamool Congress won three, the Biju Janata Dal and Bahujan Samaj Party four each, and the Samajwadi Party secured one seat, that of Azamgarh, which the late Mulayam Singh Yadav had won.
Simultaneous polling for 42 Assembly seats in Odisha will also be held on Saturday. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has predicted no adverse impact of the cyclone, the Election Commission said.
It said voters in parliamentary constituencies in urban centres like Delhi, Gurgaon, and Faridabad “are specially reminded about their right and duty to vote and break the trend of urban apathy”.
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Polling until now has been completed in 428 constituencies. The last phase, on June 1, will have polling in 57 seats. A bypoll for the Karnal Assembly seat will also be held. Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, who had quit as Kurukshetra member of Parliament, is a contestant there.
Key candidates in the sixth phase are Maneka Gandhi (Sultanpur); Dharmendra Pradhan (Sambalpur); Rao Inderjit Singh and Raj Babbar (Gurgaon); Sambit Patra (Puri); Manohar Lal Khattar (Karnal); Naveen Jindal (Kurukshetra); Mehbooba Mufti (Anantnag); Deependra Hooda (Rohtak); Bansuri Swaraj (New Delhi); and Kanhaiya Kumar (North East Delhi).
With Srinagar and Baramulla recording improved voter turnouts, there is anticipation in the Kashmir Valley that Anantnag’s turnout would be better than the 8.98 per cent it registered in 2019. That was the worst turnout for any constituency across the country. Polling in Anantnag was to take place on May 7, but was postponed because of inclement weather. The National Conference had won the seat in 2019.
The BJP’s successes in 2019 had come not just in Delhi, Haryana, Jharkhand, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh. It had surprised the ruling regional parties in West Bengal and Odisha by its improved performance in the two coastal states.
The BJP won five seats in West Bengal’s Jungle Mahal region, the state’s tribal belt. Of the Trinamool’s three wins, two were thanks to Dibyendu Adhikari (Tamluk) and his father Sisir Adhikari (Kanthi). With Suvendu Adhikari switching to the BJP in 2021, the Lok Sabha polls will test whether the Adhikari family continues to hold sway.
In the 2021 Assembly polls, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had lost to Suvendu, the elder brother of Dibyendu, from the Nandigram Assembly seat, which falls in the Tamluk Lok Sabha seat.
Former Calcutta High Court judge Abhijit Gangopadhyay is the candidate from the seat this time. The BJP has fielded Suvendu’s younger brother Soumendu from Kanthi.
Of the 14 seats in Uttar Pradesh that will have their polling on Saturday, the BJP suffered at the hands of the alliance between the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Samajwadi Party (SP) in 2019. The BJP bagged nine, the BSP four and the SP had won one seat.
Of these, the BSP’s Ambedkar Nagar MP, Ritesh Pandey, is now the BJP candidate. From Shrawasti, a seat it had lost in 2019, the BJP has fielded Saket Misra, son of Nripendra Misra, former principal secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The SP has fielded Ram Shiromani Verma, who had won in 2019 on a BSP ticket.
In Bihar, of the eight seats going to the polls in this phase, the BJP won four and its allies, the Janata Dal (United) and Lok Janshakti Party, won the rest.