Panaji/Dehradun/Lucknow: In addition to 55 seats in the state, all the assembly seats in Goa and Uttarakhand will go to the polls on Monday for the second phase of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, former Chief Minister Harish Rawat, and Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Azam Khan are among the prominent candidates. Voting for 40 seats of the Goa Legislative Assembly will be held on Monday, for which all preparations have been made. 301 candidates are in the fray for these seats.
Goa, a state traditionally with bipolar politics, is witnessing a multi-cornered contest with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Trinamool Congress (TMC), and other smaller parties competing to make a mark on the state’s electoral landscape. An election official said that to prevent the spread of Covid-19, the voters will be provided with gloves at the polling stations. He said that more than 100 women polling stations have been set up in the state for the convenience of women voters.
In the second phase of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, voting will be held for 55 seats in nine districts on Monday and all preparations have been completed for this. Election to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly is proposed in seven phases. In the second phase, voting will be held on Monday for 55 assembly seats in nine districts of the state – Saharanpur, Bijnor, Moradabad, Sambhal, Rampur, Amroha, Badaun, Bareilly, and Shahjahanpur. Election officials said that all arrangements have been made to conduct the polls following the Covid-19 protocol.
All the preparations have been completed for the voting for the 70 seats in the Uttarakhand Assembly elections to be held on Monday. Polling in Uttarakhand will start from 8 am and will continue till 6 pm. 11,697 centers have been set up for polling. Important candidates whose political future is to be decided in these elections include Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, his cabinet colleagues Satpal Maharaj, Subodh Uniyal, Arvind Pandey, Dhan Singh Rawat, and Rekha Arya, besides BJP’s Uttarakhand unit president Madan Kaushik. . Prominent Congress candidates include former Chief Minister Harish Rawat, former minister Yashpal Arya, Congress’s Uttarakhand unit president Ganesh Godiyal and Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Pritam Singh. In the 2017 assembly elections, the BJP had won 57 seats, the Congress 11, while independent candidates won two seats.
Prominent candidates in Goa include Chief Minister Pramod Sawant (BJP), Leader of Opposition Digambar Kamat (Congress), former Chief Minister Churchill Alemao (TMC), Ravi Naik (BJP), Laxmikant Parsekar (Independent), former Deputy Chief Minister Vijay Sardesai (GFP) Sudin. Dhavalikar (MGP), former Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar’s son Utpal Parrikar and AAP’s chief ministerial face Amit Palekar. The Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) had announced a pre-poll alliance, while the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is fighting the polls on its own.
Voting will be held in Uttar Pradesh from 7 am to 6 pm on Monday. Of the 55 seats to be held in the second phase, the BJP won 38 seats in 2017 while the SP got 15 and the Congress two. The SP and the Congress had fought the last assembly elections in the alliance. Of the 15 seats won by the SP, Muslim candidates won 10 seats. The prominent faces in the fray in this phase include Dharam Singh Saini, a minister in the Uttar Pradesh government, who left the BJP and joined the SP. Azam Khan has been fielded from his stronghold Rampur seat while Saini is trying his luck from Nakud assembly constituency. Khan’s son Abdullah Azam has been fielded from Swar seat. Voting was held on February 10 in the first phase of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. The counting of votes will take place on March 10.
