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The campaigning for the sixth phase of polling in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections is coming to an end on Thursday.
A total of 889 candidates will be in the fray in the 57 Lok Sabha seats from eight states and Union Territories (UTs) that will go to voting in the sixth phase on May 25. This will include all seven seats of Delhi and all 10 constituencies of Haryana besides several seats in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, among other states.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will start his poll campaign in Punjab with his first rally in Patiala on Thursday.
PM Modi will first address a rally in Bhiwani-Mahendragarh in Haryana, which is going to vote in the sixth phase. He will then proceed to Punjab.
Punjab BJP general secretary Rakesh Rathour said the PM will address three public rallies in the state on Thursday and Friday. Modi’s Patiala meeting will be followed by rallies in Gurdaspur and Jalandhar the next day, Rathour said.
The BJP has fielded four-time MP Preneet Kaur from the Patiala parliamentary constituency.
Polling for 13 Lok Sabha seats in Punjab will be held on June 1 in the seventh and final phase of the Lok Sabha elections.
Meanwhile, farmer leader Balbir Singh Rajewal has said that protesting farmers will show black flags to PM Modi when he visits Punjab for campaigning. A decision in this regard was taken at a rally organised by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) in Jagraon in Ludhiana district.
In context: Farmers owing allegiance to various farm unions have been upset with the BJP-led Centre for not accepting their various demands including a law on minimum support price (MSP) for their crops.
The farmers have also been angry over not being allowed to head towards Delhi, forcing them to camp at Shambhu and Khanauri border points of Punjab and Haryana.
The SKM (Non-Political) and Kisan Mazdoor Morcha (KMM) are spearheading the “Delhi Chalo” march by farmers to urge the government to accept their demands.
The agitating farmers have held protests and shown black flags during the Lok Sabha poll campaigning by the BJP leaders and candidates in villages in Punjab as well as Haryana.
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On Thursday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah will be in Uttar Pradesh where he will address four public meetings in the Lok Sabha constituencies of Domariyaganj, Sant Kabir Nagar, Ambedkar Nagar and Pratapgarh. All the four seats are going to polls in the sixth phase.
BJP president J P Nadda and UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and his Assam counterpart Himanta Biswa Sarma will address election rallies in Odisha.
While Nadda will address meetings at Karanjia, Dhamnagar, Barchana and Balikuda, Adityanath, who will campaign in Odisha for the first time in this election, will address rallies at Chilika and Kulia, BJP’s state unit vice-president Golak Mohapatra said.
Sarma, on the other hand, will address rallies in Deogarh, Barbil, Choudwar and Baramba.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi will hold roadshows and rallies at Dilshad Garden in the North East Delhi Lok Sabha seat and at Mangolpuri in North West Delhi constituency on Thursday.
In Delhi, the Congress is contesting three seats while its ally Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is in the fray from the remaining four. Kanhaiya Kumar is the Congress’s candidate from the North East Delhi seat and will take on sitting BJP MP Manoj Tiwari.
All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will participate in a roadshow in Sirsa in Haryana and will proceed to address a rally in Karnal. The party has fielded former state Congress chief Kumari Selja in Sirsa, who will take on the BJP’s Ashok Tanwar. In Karnal, the Congress’s youth leader Divyanshu Budhiraja is pitted against former CM Manohar Lal Khattar of the BJP.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat will arrive in Tripura on Thursday on a six-day visit, an RSS leader said.
During the visit, Bhagwat will join a training camp at Seva Dam, RSS state headquarters in West Tripura’s Khayerpur. “RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat is scheduled to arrive here on Thursday to join a training programme for RSS pracharaks from different North-eastern states. He will have a separate session with the pracharaks,” RSS’s state publicity in-charge Tapas Roy said.
Altogether 112 pracharaks from different North-eastern states are participating in a 20-day training programme, he added.
– With PTI inputs
