Many parties in Kerala, including the Congress, were seen struggling to end the problems in seat-sharing and disputes among aspirants for seats and to persuade rebels to withdraw from their plan to contest even hours after filing of nominations for the crucial election to the three-tier local self-government institutions came to a close on Wednesday afternoon.
As the exact number of candidates was yet to be released by the State Election Commission, sources said on Wednesday evening that more than 150,000 aspirants could have filed nomination papers for elections in the total 21,905 wards. Heavy rush was witnessed on Wednesday across the State for filing nominations as parties were unable to settle disputes over seat allocation.
Scrutiny of the nominations will take place on Thursday and the last day for withdrawing candidature will be Saturday. Polling for the civic poll in the State will be held in two phases on November 2 and 5. Counting of votes will be held on November 7.
In all, elections will be held in 1,199 local bodies - 941 village panchayats, 152 block panchayats, 14 district panchayats, 86 Municipal councils and six city corporations - in the State. The State Election Commission had announced the schedule for the polls on October 3 and the notification was issued on October 7.
As seat allocations of several parties had not been completed satisfactorily in a large number of local bodies, more candidates than one filed nominations on Wednesday from the same party in the same wards. Party leaderships are now left with the difficult task of making rebel candidates withdraw their nominations.
Worst-hit by the problems in seat allocation and rebel trouble are the Congress and the ruling UDF it leads. Even after discussions that continued for several weeks, the UDF had not been able to end the dispute between the Congress and the Muslim league, second biggest UDF constituent, in Malappuram district, the latter’s stronghold.
The Congress on Wednesday continued to witness open wars between the ‘A’ and ‘I’ groups for seats, apart from the objections raised by the Youth Congress over non-allocation of seats to the youth. In Thrissur Corporation where a Congress Minister wanted his daughter to become the Mayor candidate, the YC had taken their protests to the streets with a shirt-less demonstration.