E-Paper
All you need to know about phase 3 of Lok Sabha elections
The third phase of the Lok Sabha elections will cover the highest number of seats in any phase across 13 states and 2 Union Territories - Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli.
The third phase of the Lok Sabha elections will see as many as 117 seats going to vote on April 23. Among the seats will be a solitary seat from Tripura, Tripura East, where elections were delayed by one phase due to security reasons.
The third phase of the Lok Sabha elections will cover the highest number of seats in any phase across 13 states and 2 Union Territories - Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli.
The third phase of the Lok Sabha elections will see all 26 seats of Gujarat, 20 seats of Kerala and both the North and South Goa seats coming out to vote. In the heartland state of Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha, voters from 10 Lok Sabha constituencies will exercise their franchise. In Bihar, where the BJP is in an alliance with the Janata Dal (United), five out of the state’s 40 seats will go to vote.
Watch | Lok Sabha Elections 2019: Big fights to watch out for in Phase 3 of voting
In the first phase, the lowest polling was recorded in Bihar with 50 per cent of the voters casting their vote, and the highest voter turnout was recorded in West Bengal at 81 per cent polling. The second phase saw a cumulative total of 68 per cent voter turnout.
With the third phase covering four seats of Assam and one of Tripura, elections in the Northeastern states will come to an end.
In Gujarat, which the BJP had swept completely by winning all 26 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress, buoyed by the Assembly election results of December 2017, will be looking to better its performance in these Lok Sabha elections.
In Karnataka, where the first round of elections was held in the second phase on April 18 on 14 of the state’s 28 seats, the remaining 14 constituencies will cast their vote. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had won 11 of the 14 Lok Sabha seats that will vote in phase 3, leaving the Congress with just three seats in the bag. In Karnataka, the Congress and the HD Deve Gowda-led Janata Dal-Secular have tied up in an alliance to take on the BJP. In the 14 seats that will vote on April 23, the Congress will be contesting 11 seats, while the JD(S) will test its luck against the BJP on three seats.
Veteran Congress leader and Leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge is among the prime candidates that the Congress has fielded from Gulbarga against the BJP’s Umesh G Jadhav. Kharge has been the sitting MP from this seat since the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.
In Kerala, the most interesting contest will be in Wayanad, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi’s second seat after Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. Rahul Gandhi will go up against first time contestant Thushar Vellapally. The Left has not taken too kindly to Rahul Gandhi contesting from Wayanad, saying that if the Congress chief was serious about taking on the BJP, he would have chosen some other seat. Not just the Left front, the BJP leadership too has questioned the move saying that if Rahul Gandhi wanted to send a message to the south, he should have contested from either Thiruvananthapuram or Pathanamthitta. The Congress, meanwhile, is looking at Rahul Gandhi’s candidature from the seat as a move that will reinvigorate the party workers, not just in Kerala, but also in the two neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
The other interesting and closely watched contest will be in Thiruvananthapuram where Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, who is also the sitting MP from the seat, will go up against veteran BJP leader, former state BJP chief and former governor of Mizoram, Kummanam Rajasekharan. Rajasekharan resigned from his post as Mizoram governor at the behest of the BJP within a span of 10 months of being appointed to the prestigious position to contest the Lok Sabha elections.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had not managed to win even one of the 20 Lok Sabha seats in the state, with the Congress-led United Democratic Front romping home with 12 seats, while the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front had managed to win the remaining eight seats.
In Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state, the third phase of the electoral battle in the Lok Sabha elections will see the battleground shift to a region of the state that is dominated by either the backward Yadav vote bank or the Muslims. While the SP-BSP alliance in the state will be looking to cash in on the Dalit votes courtesy Mayawati, the gathbandhan will also be looking to retain the Samajwadi Party’s traditional Yadav vote from the region. While the five seats - Firozabad, Mainpuri, Etah, Badaun, Aonla - that go to vote on Tuesday are known as the Yadav land of UP politics, the remaining five seats - Moradabad, Sambhal, Rampur, Pilibhit and Barelly - are mostly a Muslim-dominated region.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Samajwadi Party had won only five seats, of which two - Azamgarh and Mainpuri - had been won by the party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav. The remaining three seats, Badaun, Firozabad and Kannauj were also won by the Yadav family members only, including the party president Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav.
This time around, Mulayam Singh is once again contesting from Mainpuri, while Dimple Yadav is looking to score a hattrick victory from Kannauj.
In Uttar Pradesh, the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party has tied up with Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party and Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal to take on the BJP. Ironically, against what was expected, the SP-BSP-RLD alliance had refused to bring into its fold the Congress party, letting it contest the elections on its own.
One of the most awaited battles in Uttar Pradesh will be that of Samajwadi Party’s Azam Khan contesting against the BJP backed former Bollywood actor Jaya Prada. Another interesting contest in the third phase of the Lok Sabha elections will be in Pilibhit from where BJP’s Varun Gandhi, the sitting MP from Sultanpur, has thrown in his hat in the ring, swapping places with his mother and BJP leader Maneka Gandhi, the current sitting MP from Pilibhit.
