Phase 5: Rae Bareli, Lucknow among 49 Lok Sabha seats to vote on Monday
File image of a voter | (Photo: PTI)
Forty-nine Lok Sabha constituencies across eight states and Union Territories, including high-stakes seats of Union ministers Piyush Goyal in Mumbai North, Rajnath Singh in Lucknow and Smriti Irani in Amethi, and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in Rae Bareli, will vote on Monday in Phase-V of the elections.
Mumbai, Thane and Lucknow are the seats known for urban voter apathy. The Election Commission (EC) has “specially” appealed to “these city dwellers to erase the stigma by turning out in larger numbers”.
Five years ago, the Congress won just one of these seats, Rae Bareli of Uttar Pradesh, while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) bagged 32, its ally the undivided Shiv Sena, seven, and Bihar’s partners – the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP). ) and Janata Dal (United) – won one seat each. The Trinamool Congress won four, and the Biju Janata Dal two.
The EC said on Sunday that 89.5 million voters would be eligible to cast their votes in these constituencies. Simultaneous elections will be held in Odisha for 35 Assembly seats. The EC said the average turnout in the first four phases of the Lok Sabha polls was 66.95 per cent, while 451 people had already voted. The average voter turnout was 67.4 percent for all seven phases in 2019.
For the 49 seats that will be elected on Monday, the average turnout in 2019 was 61.34 percent. Of the 543 seats, 379 seats, or 70 percent, have already voted, and now that voting for Phase-V has concluded on Monday evening, 79 percent of the seats will have voted.
The states and UTs that will be voted in phase V are Bihar (5 seats), Jammu and Kashmir’s Baramulla and Ladakh, Jharkhand (3), Maharashtra (13), Uttar Pradesh (14), Odisha (5) and West Bengal ( 7). In 2019, the BJP won 13 of UP’s 14 seats, all three from Jharkhand, six from Maharashtra, while the Shiv Sena won the remaining seven, and three each in Odisha and Bengal.
Other leading candidates in the fray are Ujwal Nikam (Mumbai North Central), Kalyan Banerjee (Srerampore), Lallu Singh (Faizabad) and Chirag Paswan (Hajipur). In Odisha’s Sundargarh, former Indian hockey team captain Dilip Tirkey will take on BJP’s Jual Oram. In Bihar’s Saran, the contest is between Rajiv Pratap Rudy of BJP and Rohini Acharya of Rashtriya Janata Dal, daughter of former Bihar CM Lalu Prasad. In UP’s Kaiserganj, the BJP has fielded sitting MP and former Wrestling Federation of India leader Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh’s son Karan Bhushan.
First print: May 19, 2024 | 5:22 PM IST