Curtain down on marathon polls

Varanasi in focus as millions turn up for last phase of parliamentary elections.

Braving a scorching sun, millions of people in 41 constituencies exercised their franchise in the ninth and final phase of India’s Lok Sabha elections, with all eyes on Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, the second constituency from which BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is trying to make his maiden entry into the Lower House of Parliament.

Modi was also in the fray from Vadodara in Gujarat, where polling was held on April 30.

His main rivals in Varanasi are Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal and local Congress leader Ajay Rai.

Long queues were seen at most of the 71,254 polling stations in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, with some people in Varanasi — which saw heavy balloting — complaining that they had been waiting for four hours to vote.

Around 1.6 million people were eligible to cast their votes in Varanasi in what is clearly the keenest contest of the 2014 elections. There were long queues of voters outside polling stations in most areas of the city.

Election Commission officials said that more than 50 per cent of the 66 million electorate had voted in the first six hours after polling began at 7am, the maximum in West Bengal.

Although the contest was intense in each of the 41 constituencies voting on Monday, most attention across the country was on Varanasi where AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal claimed he was sure to defeat Modi.

“The situation has changed in the last three days, and now everyone is saying Modi is losing,” Kejriwal told journalists.

Kejriwal insisted that the Varanasi battle was no more a triangular contest. “(Congress candidate) Ajai Rai does not feature anywhere. I feel it is a direct fight with Modi.”

The authorities deployed around 45,000 security personnel to ensure free and fair polls in the city. More than 12,000 polling booths were put under surveillance with CCTV cameras and proceedings at more than 300 polling stations were being videographed.

The Election Commission deployed Tamil Nadu Chief Electoral Officer Praveen Kumar as a special observer for the Varanasi constituency following complaints of bias against the local election officials by the BJP. Several senior police officers of Uttar Pradesh were also camping in the city.

The constituencies that voted on Monday were 18 in Uttar Pradesh, 17 in West Bengal and six in Bihar. They had a total of 66.13 million voters and there were 606 candidates in the fray.

Other prominent candidates in the fray in Uttar Pradesh included Samajwadi Party (SP) supremo and former chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav from Azamgarh and UP Legislative Assembly Speaker Mata Prasad Pandey from Doomariaganj.

Union Minister of State for Home Affairs R P N Singh was contesting from Kushinagar and popular Bhojpuri film actor Ravi Kishan from Jaunpur, both on the Congress ticket. Veteran BJP leader Kalraj Mishra was contesting the Deoria seat. Quami Ekta Dal (QED) leader Mukhtar Ansari, who withdrew from the contest in Varanasi and later announced his support for the Congress, was in the contest from Ghosi.

In Bihar, the prominent candidates included well-known Hindi filmmaker Prakash Jha, who was trying his luck yet again, this time as a Janata Dal (United) candidate, and former Union Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Hena Sahab, wife of jailed former MP Mohammad Shahabuddin.

Nearly 55 per cent of the electorate had voted till 4pm in Bihar. The highest polling of nearly 70 per cent was reported till 3pm in West Bengal, where the ruling Trinamool Congress is battling the Congress, the Left and a resurgent BJP in 17 Lok Sabha seats.

The opposition accused the Trinamool Congress (TMC) of unleashing violence to intimidate voters. They claimed that a number of their polling agents were driven out of booths.

The Trinamool denied the allegations. TMC had fielded former Union ministers Sudip Bandopadhyay, Dinesh Trivedi in Barrackpore and Sougata Roy in Dum Dum and actors Dipak Adhikari (Dev) from Ghatal and Tapas Paul in Krishinagar.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) had put up Subhashini Ali against Trivedi in Barrackpore, while the BJP had fielded well-known magician P C Sorcar (Junior) in Barasat. West Bengal Congress chief Adhir Chowdhury was the party’s candidate in Berhampore.

With inputs from IANS

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