Second phase of LS polls: Polling on Friday for 89 seats in 13 states

New Delhi, Apr 25 (PTI) Voting for the second phase of Lok Sabha polls will be held on Friday for 89 seats in 13 states with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi 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 1206 candidates with four from Outer Manipur constituency will contest elections in this phase, campaigning for which ended 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 seeking a hat-trick of wins from their respective constituencies.

The first of the seven-phase elections held last Friday for 102 seats across 21 states and Union territories saw a voter turnout of around 65.5 per cent.

After Friday’s phase, polling will be over in Kerala, Rajasthan and Tripura. In the first phase on April 19, polling was completed in all seats of Tamil Nadu (39), Uttarakhand (5), Arunachal Pradesh (2), Meghalaya (2), Andaman and Nicobar Islands (1), Mizoram (1), Nagaland (1), Puducherry (1), Sikkim (1) and Lakshadweep (1).

In 2019, the NDA had won 56 of these 89 seats and the UPA 24. Six of these seats have been redrawn as part of the delimitation exercise.

In Kerala, 2,77,49,159 people are eligible to cast their votes and out of them more than five lakh are first-time voters.

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.

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, famous for portraying Lord Ram’s character in Ramayan TV series, is making his electoral debut against BSP’s Devvrat Kumar Tyagi and SP’s Sunita Verma.

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.