The second and the final phase polling for the remaining 72 Assembly seats will be held on Tuesday, November 19, amid reports that the State is heading for a photo finish between the ruling BJP and the Congress.
Over 1.39 crore voters, including 68.30 lakh women, will be eligible to exercise their franchise at 18,015 polling booths to decide the fate of 843 candidates of which 75 are women. As many as 3,000 CCTV cameras will be installed at the polling booths to ensure free and fair polls.
Reports from interior areas and political analysts too say that race for power is wide open for the BJP to score hat-trick and also for the Congress to stage a comeback in the State. The Congress is out of power in the mineral-rich State since Dec 2003 when Ajit Jogi-led Government suffered a crushing defeat.
Chief Minister Raman Singh, who is BJP’s poster boy in Chhattisgarh, says that the people are determined to give one more chance to the BJP to accelerate the pace of development. “In past one-decade the BJP Government has put the development in top gear, the march for development must continue in the State and what I have experienced in my campaigning across the State that people have already made up their mind to continue with the BJP regime,” the Ayurvedic doctor-turned-politician Singh told The Pioneer.
He claimed, “There is no anti-incumbency feeling in the State anywhere despite a decade-old governance of the BJP.” Ajit Jogi, the face of the Congress in the State despite the party restrained itself to project any leader as chief ministerial candidate, claims that the Congress is set to stage a grand comeback in Chhattisgarh.
“Ask anyone in rural or in urban areas, the honest reply is that the Congress is all set to make a comeback in power, actually people are fed up with a gross misrule and a series of scams as well in massive rise in Maoist militancy during BJP raj,” Jogi remarked.
The opinion polls carried out by various agencies in recent weeks say that the BJP would get the third term in Chhattisgarh. Election data shows that the second phase polling for 72 seats of which 17 are reserved for Scheduled Tribes and nine for Scheduled Castes, are spread out in 19 districts.
Saraipali seat in Mahasamund district has just five contestants which is the lowest figure among all 72 seats while the maximum number of candidates, 38, are contesting from Raipur South seat in Raipur district where the BJP heavyweight and PWD Minister Brijmohan Agrawal is seeking his sixth consecutive victory. In the first phase of the polling, 18 seats, majority of these were located in Maoists stronghold went to polling on November 11.