NEW DELHI: The stage is set for voting to take place for the second phase of Lok Sabha polls on Friday for 89 seats in 13 states and Union Territory.
Prominent among leading political leaders who are in the fray this time include Congress leader Rahul Gandhi who is seeking a second-straight term from Wayanad in Kerala.
All 20 seats of Kerala will go to polls besides 14 of the 28 seats in Karnataka, 13 seats in Rajasthan, 8 seats each in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, 7 seats in Madhya Pradesh, 5 seats each in Assam and Bihar, 3 seats each in Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, and 1 seat each in Manipur, Tripura and Jammu and Kashmir.
A total of 1,206 candidates with four from the Outer Manipur constituency will contest elections in this phase, campaigning for which came to a close on Wednesday evening.
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar and actor-turned-politician Arun Govil, Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar’s brother DK Suresh (Cong), and former Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy (JDS) are among the key candidates while BJP’s Hema Malini, Om Birla and Gajendra Singh Shekhawat are seeking a hat-trick of wins from their respective constituencies.
Gandhi is the sitting MP from Wayanad and is pitted against CPI’s Annie Raja and BJP’s K Surendran.
Tharoor is aiming to win the Thiruvananthapuram seat for the fourth time. He is pitted against Chandrasekhar from the BJP and CPI’s Pannyan Raveendran.
Hema Malini, who has represented the Mathura constituency since 2014, is contesting against Congress’s Mukesh Dhangar while Om Birla, a two-time MP from Kota, is facing Prahlad Gunjal of the Congress.
Union minister Shekhawat is eyeing a third win from the Jodhpur seat and is pitted against Congress candidate Karan Singh Uchiyarda.
Tejasvi Surya, the sitting MP for Bangalore South and the national president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), will face Congress’s Sowmya Reddy.
Former chief minister of Chhattisgarh and Congress leader Bhupesh Baghel is contesting from Rajnandgaon, a stronghold of the BJP for over 30 years.
Govil, who portrayed Lord Ram’s character in Ramayan TV series, is making his electoral debut against BSP’s Devvrat Kumar Tyagi and SP’s Sunita Verma from the Meerut Lok Sabha seat.
The contest for the Alappuzha seat in Kerala has turned into a prestige battle for the Congress with All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary K C Venugopal’s return to the Lok Sabha poll fray after 2014 as the party looks to wrest the only seat it lost to the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) in its landslide 19-1 victory in Kerala in the 2019 polls.
Venugopal has not lost any major election in his career. He won the Alappuzha Assembly seat thrice in a row in 1996, 2001, and 2006 and was elected to the Lok Sabha from Alappuzha in 2009 and 2014.
In 2019, he did not contest after the party elevated him to the post of the AICC general secretary.
Sukanta Majumdar, incumbent BJP MP from Balurghat in West Bengal is seeking re-election. He is pitted against Biplab Mitra of the Trinamool Congress and Joydeb Siddhanta of the Revolutionary Socialist Party.
Staggered over seven stages, the first phase of the elections held last Friday for 102 seats across 21 states and Union territories saw a voter turnout of around 63 per cent. with agency inputs