EC to declare post-Diwali polls in five states

The Election Commission (EC) will announce post-Diwali dates for polls in five states by the end of September. Chetan Chauhan writes.

Updated on: Sep 22, 2013, 19:13:13 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, NEW DELHI

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The Election Commission (EC) will announce post-Diwali dates for polls in five states by the end of September.

Delhi will go to polls along with Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram as the winter begins. These assembly elections are being touted as the semi-finals before the country’s general elections in April-May 2014.

Except for Mizoram, Congress and BJP are pitted directly against each other in these states.

While Delhi has had Sheila Dikshit of Congress in power for 15 years, the BJP has been ruling Madhya Pradesh for a decade. In Rajasthan, the Congress trumped BJP in the 2008 assembly elections.

Official sources said polls in Delhi, Mizoram, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh would be held in a single phase but on different dates to enable security personnel to move from one location to another.

Polls in Chhattisgarh may be held in two phases, with Maoist-affected districts going to elections on a different date.

“We are all set. The polls will be held after the festival (Diwali) season,” a senior EC official told Hindustan Times.

Diwali falls on November 2.

Officials said polling would start from mid-November for different states and will continue till the first week of December. The counting of votes in all states will happen simultaneously in mid-December to end the poll process before Christmas.

While the tenure of the Delhi assembly is expiring on December 17, the term of the Madhya Pradesh assembly ends on December 12. Mizoram assembly's term expires on December 16, Rajasthan on December 31 and Chhattisgarh on January 4.

Chief election commissioner VS Sampath along with election commissioners HS Brahma and Nasim Zaidi has held meetings with chief electoral officers and home ministry officials regarding the preparations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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