- Wednesday, May 01, 2024
State elections in the two north-eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim will also take place on the same day. Fates of a number of top ministers of the Modi government will be sealed in this phase.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE 18th general elections in India will kick off on Friday (19) with voting taking place in 102 constituencies across 21 states and Union Territories of the country.
Among those in the fray are some key ministers of the Narendra Modi government — Nitin Gadkari, Sarbanada Sonowal and Bhupendra Yadav — besides the opposition Indian National Congress’s Gaurav Gogoi and Kanimozhi of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. The fate of K Annamalai, the chief of the Tamil Nadu chapter of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, will also be decided in this phase.
Alongside the national elections, polling will also be held in two north-eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh (60 constituencies) and Sikkim (32 constituencies) on Friday.
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Voting will begin at 7 am local time and end at 6 pm local time.
The first phase will see the highest number of parliamentary constituencies going to polls.
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The Election Commission of India has deployed over 1.8 million polling personnel across 187,000 polling stations where over 166.3 million voters will exercise their franchise, including 84 million men, 82.3 million women and 11,371 from the third gender.
There are as many as 3.5 million first time voters, besides 35 million young voters in the age group of 20-29 years.
While the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance under Modi is seeking a stronger majority, the constituents of the opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance bloc are hoping for a rebound after facing reverses in the 2014 and 2019 elections.
Polling will be held in all seats of nine states and one UT — 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 the state of Rajasthan, eight in Uttar Pradesh, six in Madhya Pradesh, five seats each in Assam and Maharashtra, four in Bihar, three in West Bengal, two seats in Manipur, and one seat each in Tripura, Jammu and Kashmir and Chhattisgarh.
Campaigning for the first phase concluded on Wednesday evening.
Besides Gadkari, Sonowal and Yadav, six other federal ministers – Kiren Rijiju, Sanjeev Baliyan, Jitendra Singh, Arjun Ram Meghwal, L Murugan and Nisith Pramanik are among the contestants besides two former chief ministers – Biplab Kumar Deb (Tripura) and Nabam Tuki (Arunachal Pradesh), and former Telangana governor Tamilisai Soundararajan.
In the 2019 elections, the NDA had won 41 of these 102 seats going to polls on Friday while the United Progressive Alliance, predecessor of the INDIA bloc, won in 45.
Six of these seats have been redrawn as part of the delimitation exercise.
Banks, schools and colleges in many of the poll-bound states and cities on Friday will remain closed due to voting. Public holidays were also announced in some of the states and government offices will remain shut.
The second phase is on April 26.
(With PTI inputs)
