The general elections to elect 543 members of the 18th Lok Sabha are underway in India. The elections are being held in seven phases, spanning from April 19 to June 1, 2024. Let’s delve into the details of the first phase:
Key Points:
Voting Schedule: The first phase of polling commenced on April 19, 2024. Voters across 21 states and Union Territories are heading to the polls.
Constituencies: A total of 102 constituencies are participating in the first phase. Here are some of the notable ones:
- Alipurduars (West Bengal)
- Almora (Uttarakhand)
- Alwar (Rajasthan)
- Andaman & Nicobar Islands
- Arakkonam (Tamil Nadu)
- Arunachal East and Arunachal West (Arunachal Pradesh)
- Aurangabad (Bihar)
- Bastar (Chhattisgarh)
- Bikaner (Rajasthan)
- Chennai Central, Chennai North, and Chennai South (Tamil Nadu)
- Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu)
- Coochbehar (West Bengal)
- Dausa (Rajasthan)
- Dharmapuri (Tamil Nadu)
- Dibrugarh (Assam)
- Erode (Tamil Nadu)
- Gadchiroli-Chimur (Maharashtra)
- Ganganagar (Rajasthan)
- Garhwal (Uttarakhand)
- Gaya (Bihar)
- Hardwar (Uttarakhand)
- Inner Manipur
Voter Strength: Over 16.63 crore voters, including 8.4 crore men and 8.23 crore women, will cast their votes across 1.87 lakh polling stations.
Prominent Candidates: The first phase features several prominent candidates:
Top Union ministers Kiren Rijiju, Nitin Gadkari, Bhupendra Yadav, Arjun Ram Meghwal, Sanjeev Baliyan, Jitendra Singh, and Sarbananda Sonowal, Congress’s Gaurav Gogoi and DMK’s Kanimozhi, BJP’s Tamil Nadu chief K Annamalai.
NDA vs. INDIA Bloc: The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeks a stronger majority. Meanwhile, the opposition INDIA bloc aims for a rebound. In 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the UPA won 45 of these 102 seats, while the NDA secured 41. Note that six of these seats have been redrawn due to delimitation.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are running a very aggressive campaign to help the BJP win 370 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats. This would be a big improvement from their score in 2019. The Prime Minister wants the NDA to get 400.
With chants of “abki baar 400 paar,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s NDA alliance wants to win a third term in a row. The opposition INDIA bloc, on the other hand, is running an economical campaign, offering MSP for farmers and cash handouts to women in their manifesto.
At 1 p.m., 39.5% of people in Tamil Nadu, 33.7% of people in Rajasthan, 37.3% of people in Uttar Pradesh, and 44.4% of people in Madhya Pradesh had gone to the polls. Over 102 seats were polled today, and the average vote was 24.5% at 9 a.m. 21.2 and 19.5% of people in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, which held state elections at the same time as the general election, cast their ballots.
There were some reports of bloodshed in Bengal. In Cooch Behar, workers from the Trinamool Congress and the BJP fought with each other. The news service PTI said that both parties filed complaints about violence, scaring voters, and attacking poll workers. Someone in charge told PTI, “We have gotten a few complaints, but so far we haven’t heard of any violence.” In Manipur, which is very tense, a polling place in Bishnupur heard a lot of gunfire. A voting station was broken into in the Imphal East district, which is also in Inner Manipur. Two old people died at different voting places in Salem district, Tamil Nadu. One of them is a 77-year-old woman.
As it is now, the BJP wants to win 22 of the 25 seats in the northeast, which is an area it already controls. It also wants to win a lot of seats in the Hindi core, including in Jammu in the north and Gujarat in the west. It wants to do well in Bengal by hurting Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress and gain more ground in Odisha, even though its plan to join forces with Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal did not come together.
The BJP hopes to win big in Karnataka, which voted for a Congress government last year. The south used to be safe from all parties from the north except the Congress. It also wants to make a dent in the Dravidian politics of Tamil Nadu through engagement led by PM Modi. It is riding on the backs of a few smaller groups, such as PMK of S Ramadoss, as insurance.
The Congress has been pushed out of a lot of north India, but it says it is about to make a return. Senior leader KC Venugopal said that the party will do better in most northern states, even in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which are strongholds for the BJP. With wins in the state elections in Telangana and Karnataka and a deal with the DMK in Tamil Nadu, it gives a lot of hope for the results in the south.
There are exciting races for more than 20 places today, with eight Union ministers, two former chief ministers, one former governor, and a number of other important leaders running. Union ministers Nitin Gadkari, Jitendra Singh, Kiren Rijiju, Arjun Ram Meghwal, and Sanjiv Balyan are among them. So are former Telangana governor Tamilisai Soundararajan, Gaurav Gogoi, who is the Deputy Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, and Sarbananda Sonowal, who was the Chief Minister of Assam.
Results: The results of the Lok Sabha elections will be announced on June 4, 2024.
Stay tuned for further updates as India exercises its democratic right to vote! 🗳️🇮🇳
Watch this very interesting video by TheUnitedIndian to know more about the basics of Lok Sabha Elections 2024
