 "Modi, Narendra Modi")
Fifty seven Lok Sabha seats, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency since 2014 Varanasi, will go to polls on Saturday in the seventh and last phase of the 2024 elections. The seats are spread across seven states and the Union territory of Chandigarh.
The long drawn seven-phase polling process, that began with the first phase on April 19, will come to an end amid concerns that the unabated heat wave could affect the turnout adversely with reports of people, including workers on election duty, succumbing to suspected sunstrokes in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Suspected heat wave-related deaths were also reported from Jharkhand and Odisha. Seats in all these states are slated for polling on Saturday. The Election Commission has asked officials to take adequate measures to manage the adverse impact of the rising mercury.
According to a PTI report from Mirzapur, 13 poll personnel deployed in the constituency died at a local hospital following high fever and high blood pressure.
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In Sonbhadra, two people on election duty died and nine were taken ill because of suspected heat stroke. In UP, 13 seats, including Mirzapur and Sonbhadra’s Robertsganj constituency, will vote on Saturday. In Bihar, 14 people, including 10 polling personnel, have died due to heatstroke in the last 24 hours, officials said in Patna on Friday.
The EC said despite the hot weather conditions, voters have turned up in huge numbers at the polling stations in the past phases. The EC “called upon voters to turn out in greater numbers at polling stations and vote with responsibility and pride”.
Of the 57 seats slated to vote on Saturday, polling is scheduled in all 13 seats of Punjab and four of Himachal Pradesh. Uttar Pradeh’s 13 constituencies, nine in West Bengal, eight in Bihar, six in Odisha and three seats in Jharkhand besides Chandigarh will also go to vote. Polling for the remaining 42 assembly constituencies of Odisha and bypolls to six assembly seats in Himachal, which could have a bearing on the fate of the Congress government in the state, will also take place simultaneously.
The BJP is trying its utmost to protect its turf in UP’s Purvanchal region while much is also at stake for the Trinamool Congress in the nine seats in south Bengal, including in Kolkata, and for the Congress in Punjab, where it won eight of the state’s 13 seats in 2019.
In 2019, the Trinamool had won all the nine seats that will vote on Saturday. But the 2024 polls will test the party’s influence in the region given the BJP’s campaign focused on Sandeshkhali in Basirhat due to allegations of atrocities on women and land grabs.
In total, of the 57 seats, the BJP had won 25 seats last year. Its allies Apna Dal and Janata Dal (United) had won two and three seats, respectively. Five years back, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), an ally of the BJP at the time, had won two seats.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s only success in 2019 had come from Punjab where Bhagwant Mann bagged the Sangrur seat.
Apart from the prime minister, other prominent candidates among the total 904 contestants in the fray are Union minister Anurag Thakur (Hamirpur), Mamata Banerjee's nephew Abhishek Banerjee (Diamond Harbour), Lalu Prasad's daughter Misa Bharti (Pataliputra) and actor Kangana Ranaut (Mandi).
According to the EC guidelines, television channels and news outlets will be able to run exit poll data and its results on June 1 after 6.30 pm. The Congress has announced that it will not take part in exit poll discussions on television channels, and its representatives will join debates only on the counting day on Tuesday.
The turnout in the first six phases was 66.14 per cent, 66.71, 65.68, 69.16, 62.2 and 63.36 per cent respectively.
