Jharkhand witnessed its first incident-free polling phase of the ongoing Assembly elections on Thursday. Despite several shadow areas and hypersensitive zones in the 17 constituencies that went to polls on Thursday there were no reports of violence triggered by Left Wing Extremist (LWE) groups, Additional Director General (Operations), ML Meena said.
Meena, who also happens to be the nodal officer for security during elections, said that security forces and polling personnel were airdropped to polling stations in at least five of eight districts where polling happened on Thursday. Helicopters were used to drop polling personnel to 459 sensitive polling booths in LWE-affected areas, he added.
“No LWE incidents were reported on Thursday from any of the 17 constituencies that went to polls. We had deployed sufficient security forces across the constituencies and made foolproof security arrangements. Bomb Detection and Disposal squad was also active in the constituencies,” said Meena. Since the announcement of elections, police have recovered 71 arms, including police arms from different constituencies here, he added. “As many as 1114 live cartridges and two hand grenades and a huge cache of explosives were also recovered,” Meena said.
Out of the 7,016 polling booths, 5,342 were marked as hypersensitive booths on the basis of the presence of LWE groups in the constituencies, said police. The Election Commission of India (ECI) relocated 10 polling booths, including six in Ichagarh, for security reasons. Ichagarh falls in one of the highly-sensitive zones in terms of LWE menace in Jharkhand and is prone to attacks by insurgents.
At least 98 polling booths fell in shadow areas in this phase of polls. As many as 26 out of the 98 booths were in Koderma. The ECI identifies shadow areas as areas where there is no mobile network connectivity or any other source of communication. These areas in Jharkhand are also most likely to have presence of LWE groups.
The five-phase election in Jharkhand began on November 30 and will conclude on December 20. The first two phases of polls – on November 30 and December 7 – witnessed a fair share of LWE menace. CPI (Maoist) rebels blew up a culvert in Gumla on November 30, while rebels attacked a polling party in Khunti and torched a bus in Chaibasa on December 7. However, no casualties have been reported in LWE incidents on any of the polling dates here so far during this election.