Final phase of polling today in three states

Ahmedabad, 11 May, 2014

The 35-day-long marathon polling for the nine-phased Lok Sabha Elections 2014 ends today with elections on forty-one constituencies across three states ( Bihar, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh) including the high-profile Varanasi seat on Monday.

Over 506 million people have exercised their franchise in 502 constituencies where polling has already been held in eight phases.

With the summer elections registering a voter turnout of 66.21% so far, all eyes are on whether the Indian electorate can surpass the polling percentage of 64 registered in the 1984 elections held after Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

In the ninth phase, 600 candidates are in the fray in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. Nearly 66 million voters are expected to seal their electoral fortunes.

Of the 41 seats going to polls, the Trinamool Congress (Bengal’s ruling party) had won 14 seats in 2009, followed by six each by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Samajwadi Party (UP’s ruling party), five by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and four by the Congress.

Altogether 42 candidates are in the fray for the Varanasi parliamentary seat which has 1.7 million registered voters. Over 45,000 security personnel have been deployed in the constituency to ensure free and fair polls. Central paramilitary forces have been deployed at all the 1,562 polling stations which are also under CCTV coverage.

In 2009, the Samajwadi Party (SP) had won six of the 18 UP seats going to polls on Monday. The BSP had won five seats, the BJP four and the Congress three.

In neighbouring Bihar, six seats are up for grabs. Of them, the BJP and the ruling Janata Dal (United) — which was then an ally of the saffron party — had won two each, while Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) had bagged a solitary seat. One seat had gone to an independent candidate.

Seventeen seats go to polls in Bengal as well. The last phase of polling is a key test for the ruling Trinamool, which had won 14 of these seats.