The campaigning for the first phase of polls covering 102 parliamentary seats of 21 States and Union Territories (UTs), where voting will be held on April 19 ended at 5 pm on Wednesday.
Electioneering picked up pace on the final day of campaigning with the parties making last-minute effort to woo voters. Heatwave conditions and untimely rains with thunder and lightning had hit campaigning.
Leading the charge, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took whirlwind tours of various constituencies in the past few days, addressing rallies and holding roadshows, and asserting that he went to people with hope in 2014, trust in 2019 and guarantee in 2024. Many times he said there is “Modi’s guarantee across the country and I am giving the guarantee of fulfilling all these guarantees”. Modi held two election rallies in Assam’s Nalbari and Tripura’s Agartala on Wednesday and launched a scathing attack on the Congress during campaigning in the northeastern States saying the party had adopted the ‘loot’ east policy while the BJP turned it into the ‘Act East’ policy.
Home Minister Amit Shah, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and several of their Cabinet colleagues, leaders of the Congress such as Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi, and other parties also canvassed for their candidates.
Rahul and SP chief Akhilesh Yadav addressed a joint Press conference in Ghaziabad on Wednesday, predicting a loss for BJP in the Lok Sabha polls. The Opposition leaders, in turn, have attacked the Government over electoral bonds, alleged misuse of agencies, inflation and unemployment among other issues. The BJP has come out all guns blazing at the INDIA Bloc over corruption, dynasty politics and insulting the Constitution and Hinduism.
Eight Union Ministers - Nitin Gadkari, Kiren Rijiju, Sarbanada Sonowal, Sanjeev Baliyan, Jitendra Singh, Bhupendra Yadav, Arjun Ram Meghwal and L Murugan, two former Chief Ministers - Biplab Kumar Deb (Tripura) and Nabam Tuki (Arunachal Pradesh), and former Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan (Telangana) are among those in fray. Some high-profile seats going to polls include Chennai South, Coimbatore, Nagpur, Dibrugarh, Jorhat, Jamui.
The first phase will witness a contest among 1,625 candidates.
In 2019, the UPA had won 45 of these 102 seats and the NDA 41. Six of these seats have been redrawn as part of the delimitation exercise.
Polling will be held in all seats of Tamil Nadu (39), Uttarakhand (5), Arunachal Pradesh (2), Meghalaya (2), Andaman and Nicobar Islands (1), Mizoram (1), Nagaland (1), Puducherry (1), Sikkim (1) and Lakshadweep (1).
Besides, there will be voting in 12 seats in Rajasthan, 8 in Uttar Pradesh, 6 in Madhya Pradesh, 5 seats each in Assam and Maharashtra, 4 in Bihar, 3 in West Bengal, 2 in Manipur, and one seat each in Tripura, Jammu and Kashmir and Chhattisgarh.
In the BJPs ‘South-push’, Tamil Nadu BJP president K Annamalai is set to take the ballot test in Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore where he is pitted against DMK leader and former Coimbatore Mayor Ganapathy P Rajkumar and AIADMK’s Singai Ramachandran.
The BJP’s decision to field Annamalai prompted the DMK to put up a candidate after 10 years, which would otherwise be left to the Left parties, owing to the cluster of textile industries and its proximity to Kerala. In fact, the textile industry is what makes Coimbatore a hope for the BJP. The seat is more important to the BJP as it was one of the party’s earliest Lok Sabha seats in the State.
The hilly Wayanad seat of Kerala, seen as a safe bet for the Congress scion Rahul, might not be that safe after all. The seat which he won by a margin of 4.3 lakh in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, this time would face the Communist Party’s Annie Raja and the BJP’s Kerala chief K Surendran, among others.
Tamilisai Soundararajan, who recently resigned as Governor of Telangana and Lt Governor of Puducherry to return to active politics, is contesting from Chennai South Lok Sabha constituency.
Daughter of veteran Congress leader Kumari Ananthan, Soundararajan had contested 2019 Lok Sabha elections against DMK’s Kanimozhi, but lost by a huge margin in Thoothukudi.
Union Road and Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari is seeking a hat-trick of wins from the Nagpur seat. In 2014, he had defeated seven-time MP Vilas Muttemwar by a margin of 2.84 lakh votes and retained the seat in 2019 by defeating current Maharashtra Congress chief Nana Patole by 2.16 lakh votes.
Union Minister Kiren Rijiju is contesting from the Arunachal West seat.
The 52-year-old has represented the constituency thrice since 2004. Rijiju’s main rival is former Chief Minister and present president of Arunachal Pradesh Congress Nabam Tuki.
Sarbanada Sonowal, Union Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, is seeking a return to the Lok Sabha from Dibrugarh in Assam. Sonowal, a Rajya Sabha member, was fielded from Dibrugarh after Union Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Rameswar Teli, was not given a ticket.
Muzaffarnagar, known for its intricate caste dynamics, is witnessing a three-cornered electoral battle, with Union Minister Sanjeev Baliyan locked in competition against Samajwadi Party’s Harindra Malik and BSP candidate Dara Singh Prajapati. Jitendra Singh, a two-time parliamentarian and a junior Minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Cabinet, is aiming for a hat-trick in Udhampur.
Bhupendra Yadav, Union Minister and Rajya Sabha member who replaced sitting MP Balak Nath, is in a contest with sitting Congress MLA Lalit Yadav, who belongs to Matsya region of Alwar district in Rajasthan and enjoys the support of the Yadav community.
Union Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal is pitted against former Congress Minister Govind Ram Meghwl from Bikaner parliamentary seat in Rajasthan.
The Nilgiris Lok Sabha constituency in Tamil Nadu is witnessing one of the keenly watched battles between A Raja, the incumbent DMK MP, and former Telecom Minister, and L Murugan of the BJP, who is the Union Minister of State for Fisheries. This will be the first time that Murugan, who was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Madhya Pradesh, is contesting from here.
Sivaganga MP Karti Chidambaram is aiming for a re-election from a seat his father won seven times, competing against BJP’s T Devanathan Yadav and AIADMK’s Xavier Dass. This time, Kanimozhi is seeking re-election from the seat. NDA ally Tamil Maanila Congress (Moopanar) has fielded SDR Vijayaseelan and AIADMK has fielded R Sivasami Velumani from the constituency.
Nakul Nath, son of Congress leader and former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath, is seeking re-election Chhindwara. The seat has remained firmly with Kamal Nath, who has won the seat nine times since 1980.
In the 2019 polls, the BJP bagged 28 seats out of the State’s 29, but missed out on picking Chhindwara, where Nakul beat the BJP’s candidate by 37,536 votes to emerge as the lone Congress MP in the State.
Of the two Lok Sabha constituencies in Tripura, the seat of West Tripura that votes in the first phase on April 19 will see a high-voltage clash between former Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb and state Congress president Ashish Kumar Saha.
Having won Lok Sabha elections twice since 2014 from Kaliabor constituency in Assam, Gaurav Gogoi, Congress’ deputy leader in Lok Sabha and son of former Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, finds himself as the new candidate in neighbouring Jorhat, where BJP’s Topon Kumar Gogoi won in 2019.
Gaurav Gogoi’s shift to Jorhat came after the impact of delimitation exercise in his 2019 constituency, Kaliabor. Manipur Law and Education Minister Basanta Kumar Singh is the BJP’s nominee for the inner Manipur constituency and is pitted against JNU Professor and Congress candidate Bimal Akoijam.
Singh, who belongs to the Meiti community, is the son of Thounaojam Chaoba Singh who served as the Union Minister of State for sports, youth affairs, culture and food processing in the NDA Government-led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
The BJP stronghold of Churu, in northern Rajasthan, is readying for an interesting match between BJP candidate Devendra Jhajharia, a two-time Paralympic gold medallist javelin thrower, and Rahul Kaswan from the Congress.
Kaswan is a turncoat who has made the fight for Churu interesting. The two-time left the BJP only in March after he was denied a ticket by the party.
