Seven States will go to polls for 51 seats in the fifth phase of the Lok Sabha poll on Monday, but Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and West Bengal will draw most of the attention because more than two third of the seats in this phase come from here.
The stakes are high for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies as it had swept 40 of these seats in 2014, leaving just two for the Congress and the rest for other Opposition parties such as the Trinamool Congress (seven).
With this phase, election will be over in 424 seats and polling in the remaining 118 seats will be held on May 12 and 19, said sources.
Nearly nine crore voters will decide the fate of 674 candidates, including political bigwigs Rajnath Singh, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Smriti Irani, in the fifth phase of polling on Monday in 51 Lok Sabha constituencies in seven States.
The voting will take place in the lingering shadow of highly acrimonious poll campaign unsheathed by both the Opposition and BJP leaders with Prime Minister Narendra Modi triggering a major row by calling former PM Rajiv Gandhi “Bhrastachari No.1.”
Nearly nine crore voters will decide the fate of 674 candidates, including political bigwigs Rajnath Singh, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Smriti Irani, in the fifth phase of polling on Monday in 51 Lok Sabha constituencies in seven States.
Voting will take place in 14 seats in Uttar Pradesh, 12 in Rajasthan, seven seats each in West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, five in Bihar and four in Jharkhand. In Jammu and Kashmir, polling will take place in Ladakh constituency and Pulwama and Shopian districts of Anantnag seat.
The Election Commission has set up 94,000 polling stations/booths and made elaborate security arrangements. In the fifth and smallest phase, total 8.75 crore voters will decide the fate of 674 candidates.
The fifth phase of polling in 14 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh will see a clash of titans, including Union Ministers Rajnath Singh and Smriti Irani, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi.
The BJP had bagged 12 of these seats in 2014 with the Congress winning Sonia’s Rae Bareli and Rahul’s Amethi -- the only two constituencies where the Congress succeeded out of the 80 in the entire State.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is contesting on five seats -- Dhaurahra, Sitapur, Mohanlalganj, Fatehpur and Kaisarganj. Its ally Samajwadi Party (SP) is fighting for seven seats -- Lucknow, Banda, Kaushambi, Barabanki, Faizabad, Bahraich and Gonda.
In Amethi and Rae Bareli, the SP-BSP alliance has not put up any candidate, leaving the two constituencies for the Congress.
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh is seeking re-election from Lucknow, while his colleague at the Centre Smriti Irani is again taking on Rahul in Amethi.
Two former Olympians, one former IAS and one former IPS officer, and two seers are among the 134 candidates whose fate will be decided by voters in Rajasthan’s 12 Lok Sabha seats on Monday. After this phase, polling will come to an end in the desert State.
Former Olympians Rajyawardhan Rathore (BJP) and Krishna Poonia (Congress) have locked horns in the Jaipur Rural seat. Rathore is a Union Minister. In Bikaner, Union Minister and former IAS officer Arjun Ram Meghwal (BJP) is facing a tough fight from his cousin and Congress candidate Madangopal Meghwal, a former IPS officer. Two seers -- Sumedhanand Saraswati and Baba Balaknath -- are contesting the polls from Sikar and Alwar respectively.
In the seven Lok Sabha constituencies spread across three districts in West Bengal, it is a four-cornered contest between the Trinamool Congress, BJP, Congress and the CPI(M). The Trinamool had won all the seven seats in 2014.