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Manik Sarkar’s Left govt faces BJP challenge as Tripura votes on Sunday
Around 2.5 million voters will decide the fate for 292 candidates who are in the race for 59 of the 60 assembly seats being voted for on Sunday.
Around 11% votes had been cast by 9am on Sunday, two hours after polling opened in Tripura, where the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front faces a challenge from the BJP in its quest for a sixth successive term. (Live updates)
Amid tight security a large number of voters, including women and youth, started queuing up at polling booths early in the morning. Voting closes at 4pm.
Around 2.5 million voters will decide the fate for 292 candidates who are in the race for 59 of the 60 assembly seats being voted for on Sunday.
The voting for Charilam constituency was rescheduled to March 12 after the death of CPI(M) candidate Ramendra Narayan Deb Barma.
Snags in electronic voting machines and voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) units delayed the start of polling in some stations, reports said.
Additional chief electoral officer Tapas Roy said the complaints had been looked into. “VVPATs are fine. No machine is out of order. As people were casting votes through VVPATs (for the first time), they faced some problems,” he said.
The CPI(M), which leads the ruling coalition, is contesting 56 seats while partners -- RSP, Forward Bloc and CPI — have fielded one candidate each.
The BJP, which has tied up with the tribal outfit Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT), has fielded 51 candidates. The IPFT, an anti-Left party, will contest the remaining nine.
The Congress is going it alone and is contesting 59 seats. There are around 2.5 million registered voters, of which 1.3 million are males and 1.2 million females.
A total of 3,174 polling stations have been set up. Badharghat, which has the highest number of voters -- 57,394 -- has 70 polling stations, the most for an assembly segment in the state.
On the other hand, Karbook, a seat reserved for scheduled tribes, has the least, 34,699 voters. Twenty seats are reserved for the scheduled tribes.
State director general of police Akhil Kumar Shukla said security measures were in place to ensure free and fair polls.
He said 300 companies of central armed forces were deployed along with state armed personnel and police, while the Border Security Force was keeping a vigil along the 856km-long India-Bangladesh border.
The counting of votes will take place on March 3, with that of Nagaland and Meghalaya that vote on February 27.
(With agency inputs)
