Eleven states and a union territory will go cast their votes in the second phase of the currently underway Lok Sabha elections on April 18.
As many as 15,79,34,000 votes across 95 seats will line up from 7 am in the morning to finalise the fates of 1,629 candidates.
Tamil Nadu will witness voting in all 39 Lok Sabha constituencies with three seats each in Chhattisgarh and West Bengal participating in the exercise.
In Tamil Nadu, the elections to the Vellore constituency have been deferred indefinitely. At the same time, the sole Tripura seat which was to vote in the second phase, the Tripura East Lok Sabha constituency, will now go to polls in the third phase on April 23.
The southern state of Karnataka will witness polling in half of its 28 seats. In Karnataka, the run up to the elections has been a dramatic one with allegations and counter-allegations of poaching of legislators. While the ruling Congress-JD(S) coalition will be looking to better its numbers in the election - Congress won 9 seats and JD(S) 2 - BJP, which is banking on Modi magic, is hoping to improve its tally from 17.
In Uttar Pradesh, the second phase of the elections will be a crucial contest for the alliance comprising the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party and Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal. All eight seats from Uttar Pradesh that will vote on April 18 are right now with the BJP. The alliance will be looking to wrest these seats back from the BJP.
{{/usCountry}}In Uttar Pradesh, the second phase of the elections will be a crucial contest for the alliance comprising the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party and Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal. All eight seats from Uttar Pradesh that will vote on April 18 are right now with the BJP. The alliance will be looking to wrest these seats back from the BJP.
{{/usCountry}}Two seats in Jammu and Kashmir - Srinagar and Udhampur - will cast their votes. While National Conference chief Farooq Abdullah is seeking reelection from Srinagar, minister of state in PMO Jitendra Singh is hoping to return to the Lok Sabha from Udhampur, from where he is the sitting MP. Interestingly, Farooq Abdullah had lost the 2014 election to PDP’s Tariq Ahmed Karra, who quit the PDP in protest against civilian killing and joined the Congress. In the subsequent bypoll in Srinagar from 2017, Farooq Abdullah had won back the seat, albeit by a narrow margin of 10,766 votes.
In Odisha, five out of its 21 seats will cast their votes on Thursday. Among the seats is Kandhamal where a woman polling officer was shot dead by Maoists in a brazen attack a day before the voting in the second phase is to take place. The BJP is looking to displace or at least dent the ruling Biju Janata Dal’s hold in the state where the Naveen Patnaik-led party has ruled for nearly two decades. In 2014, the BJD had swept the elections in the state and had won 20 of the 21 seats. The BJP had won the sole remaining seat.
In West Bengal, only three of the 42 seats will line up to cast their votes. The BJP and Trinamool Congress have been embroiled in a bitter electoral campaign. The three seats that will go to polls are Jalpaiguri, Raiganj and Darjeeling. The Mamata Banerjee-led TMC, which won 34 of the 42 seats in the 2014 election, is geared up for a tough fight against the BJP. A key issue in the elections in West Bengal is that of the Citizenship Amendment Bill.
In Maharashtra, where the BJP has formed an alliance with the Shiv Sena, Congress’s state chief Ashok Chavan, senior Congressman Sushil Kumar Shinde and the BJP’s Pritam Munde will be testing their luck in the second phase of voting in the Lok Sabha elections. Of the 48 seats in the state, the BJP is contesting on 25 seats while the Sena will field its candidates on 23 seats. The Congress has tied up with Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and will be contesting on 26 and 22 seats, respectively. In the 2014 elections, the Sena-BJP alliance had won 41 of the 48 seats in the state. In a subsequent bypoll, the BJP’s tally had fallen to 22 with the Sena keeping 18, Congress two and the NCP holding five seats.
Five seats each in Assam and Bihar are also going to the hustings on Thursday. Assam has 14 seats, while Bihar has 40 seats. Bihar will witness a fight between the BJP-led and Congress-led alliances. While the BJP has tied up with the Janata Dal (United), Congress has thrown in its lot with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). The two central parties will be banking on their allies JD(U) and the RJD to help them win as many seats as possible. The election in Bihar is being seen as a fight between a formidable JD(U) and a resurgent RJD.
In Assam, the BJP will be looking to improve its standing from the previous election when it had won seven seats. The Congress and the AIUDF had won three seats each.