Lok Sabha elections phase 2: Poll mercury rises as 88 seats up for grabs today (2024)

From violence-torn Manipur in the east, to Maharashtra in the west where every political boundary has been re-drawn in the past five years, and from one seat in Jammu to all 20 seats in Kerala, 158.8 million voters, including 3.4 million first-time ones and 32.8 million people between the ages of 20 and 29, in 88 constituencies across 12 states and one Union territory will exercise their franchise in the second phase of the Lok Sabha elections on Friday.

At stake are the prospects of 1,202 candidates including three former chief ministers. Follow full coverage of the Lok Sabha elections here.

HT launches Crick-it, a one stop destination to catch Cricket, anytime, anywhere. Explore now!

By end of day, the elections for 189 seats, including all of the seats in 11 states and three UTs would be over. 102 seats went to polls in the first phase on April 19 (including some parts of the Outer Manipur constituency, where the remaining parts will vote on Friday).

To be sure, the polls were originally slated for 89 seats, but the death of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) candidate Ashok Bhalavi in Madhya Pradesh’s Betul, led to the Election Commission of India “adjourning the election.”

Also Read | Lok Sabha polls phase 2: Will BJP repeat 2019 victory? Focus on Madhya Pradesh's six seats

The turnout will be sharply in focus. It was between 64% and 65% in the first phase, compared to 69.3% for the same seats (excluding the six seats in Assam and Jammu and Kashmir, where boundaries have been redrawn in a delimitation exercise) in 2019, with analysts attributing the dip to reasons that range from the weather to voter apathy. If the turnout remains low on Friday, it will cause some concerns across political parties.

Six of the 88 seats — five in Assam and one in Jammu — are those that have been redrawn after a delimitation exercise in 2023. The 82 others saw a turnout of 69.6% in 2019. Six seats of these 88 seats are reserved for scheduled tribes, nine are reserved for scheduled castes.Counting for all seven phases will be held on June 4.

Overall, across the 82 seats for which comparative data is available, 56 are held by constituents of the NDA, 47 of which have sitting BJP members of Parliament; 23 seats are held by the members of the Opposition alliance INDIA, 17 of which are with the Congress. To be sure, 15 of these seats are from Kerala, which the Congress-led UDF swept in 2019, winning 19 of the 20 seats on offer.

The elections come in the middle of a harsh summer that presents a challenge to the Election Commission of India (ECI), with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) predicting intense heat wave conditions particularly in eastern India in states such as West Bengal and Bihar, with temperatures expected to cross 43 degrees Celsius in some districts going to polls in the second phase. In a press statement, the Election Commission said that while they believed that weather conditions would be in “normal ranges”, meticulous arrangements have been made at all polling stations to deal with hot weather conditions.

“Polling time has been extended till 6pm in many polling stations in Banka, Madhepura, Khagaria and Munger constituencies in Bihar to facilitate voters in hot weather conditions,” an ECI press statement issued on Thursday said.

Friday’s polling also comes at a time in the middle of a raging political furore, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi alleging that the Congress intends to reintroduce the inheritance tax and redistribute the benefits of reservation and wealth to Muslims.

Also Read | Lok Sabha elections Phase 2: Legacy battle for ex-CMs, test for Modi ministers in key Rajasthan seats

On Tuesday, Modi latched on to comments made by Indian Overseas Congress chief Sam Pitroda, who suggested that an inheritance tax should be “discussed and debated” and said that this was evidence the Congress intended to prevent “hard earned wealth from passing down to children.”

The Congress distanced itself from Pitroda’s comments and said it had no intention of introducing such a tax, but added that it the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government which had abolished the Estate Duty Tax, which existed for 32 years, in 1985, and that it was in fact, BJP leaders that had advocated for it over the past decade.

On Friday, addressing a political rally in Morena, Modi took the debate even further, and said that the late Rajiv Gandhi abolished estate duty to protect property that he inherited after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984. “I am placing an interesting fact before the country. When the country’s Prime Minister Indiraji passed away, her property was to be given to her children. But earlier there was a law that before it went to them, the government would take a part of it. To save their property, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi abolished the inheritance law…these people now want to bring back the same law with stringency,” Modi said.

The Congress rejected any connection between the abolition of the estate duty and Indira Gandhi’s death. Amitabh Dubey, AICC member in charge of research said that Modi was “lying” and that while Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31, 1984, the levy on estate duty was abolished for deaths “occurring on or after 16 March 1985.

In Rajasthan — 13 of its 25 seats go to polls in the second phase; 12 already did in the first — the Congress hopes to make inroads in a state the BJP swept in 2019; several high profile candidates such as Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla, and the sons of former chief ministers Ashok Gehlot and Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Vaibhah Gehlot and Dushyant Singh, are in the fray.

In Kerala, where all 20 seats go to the polls, the Congress will hope to stave off the twin challenges of a BJP that hopes to break through in southern India (two of its ministers are contesting), and the LDF which is the incumbent state government. While the Left and the Congress are both part of the INDIA alliance, they are fighting separately in Kerala in a campaign that has seen Wayanad MP and candidate Rahul Gandhi and chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan take potshots at each other. Voting will also be held in parts of Outer Manipur, the only seat in India that is seeing elections being held in two phases — a measure of the security challenge in a state that has been rocked by ethnic violence for close to a year.

There are also 14 seats that will go to the hustings in Karnataka, with seats such as Mandya and Hassan, bastions for the Deve Gowda family, set to be a test for the newly engineered BJP-JD(S) alliance. Among these seats are also four seats in Bengaluru, with DK Shivakumar’s brother DK Suresh up against CM Manjunath, Deve Gowda’s son-in-law who is fighting on a BJP ticket.

There will also be key contests in six seats of Madhya Pradesh’s Bundelkhand and Vindhya, and eight seats in Maharashtra. In Bihar, there are five seats going to the polls, including Purnea, where independent Pappu Yadav is looking to upset both the RJD and the JDU, and eight seats in Uttar Pradesh, including in Gautam Buddha Nagar and Ghaziabad in the National Capital Region. In Chhattisgarh, the conduct of elections in three seats will present a challenge for both political parties – former chief minister Bhupesh Baghel is fighting from Rajnanadgaon – and security forces, with Kanker, where 29 Maoists were killed in the most significant single-day encounter in India in eight years, and the biggest ever in Chhattisgarh being in focus. “3 helicopters, 4 special trains, and nearly 80000 vehicles have been deployed to ferry polling and security personnel(across 88 seats),” the ECI press statement said.

“All preparations have been made for polling in Mahasamund, Rajnandgaon and Kanker. Of the three, a major part of Kanker is affected by Maoists and extra vigil is being maintained by security forces while some pockets of Rajnandgaon and Mahasamund are struggling with the menace,” said Chhattisgarh chief electoral officer Reena Babasaheb Kangale.