Lok Sabha Elections 2024 | 889 candidates in fray for 58 seats as campaigning ends for penultimate round of voting

New Delhi: Campaigning for the penultimate phase of Lok Sabha elections ended on Thursday with the BJP expressing confidence that it has already crossed the majority mark while the Opposition I.N.D.I.A. bloc also claimed that the Narendra Modi regime will not win a third term.

The sixth phase of polls would see 889 candidates trying their luck in 58 seats. With the completion of six phases on May 25, the polling process in 28 states and union territories will be completed.

In these 58 seats, Congress did not win a single seat in 2019 though it hopes to improve its standing in Delhi, Haryana, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. BJP had won 40 seats while SP won one seat, which it lost in a bypoll. BSP and BJD won four seats each while JD(U) and Trinamool Congress bagged three each. LJP, AJSU and National Conference won one each.

The prominent candidates included ML Khattar (Karnal), Deepender Hooda (Rohtak), Maneka Gandhi (Sultanpur) and Mehbooba Mufti (Anantnag-Rajouri).

The seventh and last phase of elections will be held on June 1 when 57 seats in eight states and union territories will go to polls. The counting of votes will be held on June 4.

One of the keenly watched contests will be in Delhi where all the seven seats in Delhi will go to polls in this phase and the BJP is hoping to repeat the 2014 and 2019 performance of 7-0 while AAP and Congress have entered into an alliance fighting four and three seats respectively.

The BJP has changed six of the seven sitting MPs while retaining Manoj Tiwari in North East Delhi where youth leader Kanhaiya Kumar is taking on him. The Delhi Congress was also thrown into doldrums as its chief Arvinder Singh Lovely and some other leaders quit the party over alliance with AAP.

AAP also faced trouble with the Swati Maliwal episode though Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal got interim bail to campaign in Delhi.

Another state that is having a keen fight is Haryana where the BJP has won all the ten seats five years ago. However this time, the BJP is facing some trouble with angry farmers preventing party candidates from entering villages. Also, Congress has injected some instability in the BJP camp by getting three independents to withdraw support to the BJP-led state government.

Jammu and Kashmir will also see the end of polling process with Anantnag-Rajouri going to polls.