2014 Election Potboiler Heads For Grand Climax In Varanasi

NEW DELHI: A long and bruising election season will end on Monday with polling in 41 Lok Sabha seats that could have a crucial bearing on BJP's final tally. Today also marks the last chance for regional heavyweights Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party to check the saffron advance.

The 18 seats in east Uttar Pradesh that go to polls include Varanasi, where BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is locked in a blockbuster battle with Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal and Congress's local challenger Ajay Rai.

The temple town has turned into a fortress with over 45,000 security personnel being deployed to ensure free and fair polls today. Senior police officers have descended here to personally assess the situation. Central paramilitary forces have been deployed in all the 1,562 polling stations which are also under CCTV coverage.

The election took a bitter turn after BJP accused the DM and returning officer, Pranjal Yadav, of bias and demanded his removal after he controversially refused permision to Modi to hold a rally in the Muslim-dominated locality of Beniabagh. The EC strongly defended the officer but eventually appointed a special observer for the poll, whose result will be keenly watched across India.

Also in the fray today is SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, looking to make a statement in Azamgarh, a constituency with a large number of Yadav and Muslim voters.

Contest in UP could be highly polarized

The contest in UP could be highly polarized with BJP accusing Mulayam of nurturing a “base of terror” — a thinly disguised code for minority appeasement while the SP boss has urged voters to remember all that he has done for them.

BJP is hoping for a strong performance in the closing phase of the election as this will be essential to meet its target of 50 seats in the populous state. By the same measure, it is an opportunity for SP and BSP to work traditional caste equations in order to check Modi fair and square.

In next door Bihar, similar calculations are at work on six seats with estranged allies BJP and Janata Dal (U) holding two seats each. This time JD(U) seems squeezed out of the contest and the clash is between BJP and the RJD-Congress combine. The seats include Gopalganj, the ancestral home of RJD chief Lalu Prasad.

Of the seats in UP, SP holds six seats, followed by BSP with five, BJP with four and Congress with three. In West Bengal, 17 seats go to polls and of these, Trinamool Congress holds 14 seats, while Congress, CPI and Independent have one each.

Stakes are fairly high for Trinamool that has to defend its seats and hopes to gain a few though it must contend with urban constituencies where there is a perceived drift away from it and BJP has emerged a new party of choice for voters.

Prominent leaders in the fray in the three stated include Congress's Adhir Ranjan Chaudhary (Behrampur, West Bengal), BJP leader Jagdambika Pal (Domariyaganj), Union minister RPN Singh (Kushi Nagar, both UP) and former minister and RJD leader Raghuvansh Prasad Singh (Vaishali, Bihar).

There has been a record turnout of voters, surpassing the previous record in 1984, as 66.27% voting was reported in 502 Lok Sabha seats where polling has been conducted in eight phases that began on April 7.

In West Bengal, prominent TMC candidates in the race are Sudip Bandyopadhyay, Dinesh Trivedi and Saugata Roy besides celebrities like actors Dipak Adhikari (Dev) and Tapas Paul.

Trinamool Yuva president Abhishek Banerjee, nephew of chief minister Mamata Banerjee, is also in the fray.