With Bengal going into the seventh phase of elections on Monday, the Election Commission has decided to deploy 89,600 paramilitary personnel to ensure free and fair polling.
Elections will take place for 34 Assembly seats across 5 districts across North and South Bengal. While elections will be held for 6 seats each in Malda and South Dinajpur districts, nine constituencies each will go to polls in Murshidabad and West Burdwan districts. Polling will also be held for four constituencies in South Kolkata that include the up-market areas of Ballygunge and Rashbehari apart from Bhawanipore the ex-constituency of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
More than 86 lakh voters are likely to exercise their franchise to decide the fate of 284 candidates amid rising cases of corona. Bengal on Saturday registered its highest-single day spike of 14,281 corona cases, taking the total number of cases to 7,28,061. Government sources said 59 more people died of the disease on Saturday taking the toll to 10,884.
Following a High Court directive the Election Commission has issued strict protocols during the voting process in all the 12,068 polling stations.All eyes are likely to be the Bhawanipore seat from where the Chief Minister is the sitting MLA and a voter too. In the Lok Sabha elections the Trinamool Congress had trailed the BJP from this seat by a few thousand votes. Banerjee is contesting from Nandigram seat this time round.
From Bhawanipore, Bengal Power Minister with a clean image Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay is contesting against BJP’s Rudranil Ghosh a noted film actor, who left the Left post 2011 to join TMC and left the Trinamool to join the BJP early this year.
Among other notables are State Minister Firhad Hakim who is seeking re-election for a third consecutive term from the Kolkata Port constituency. BJP candidate Lt General (Retired) Subrata Saha is contesting against TMC’s Mayor-in-Council Debashis Kumar from the Rashbehari seat.
From Ballygunge veteran Bengal Minister Subrato Mukherjee is contesting against CPI(M)’s Fuad Halim and BJP’s Loknath Chatterjee.