Uttarakhand Lok Sabha seats
Uttarakhand Lok Sabha seats: Dehradun, The BJP is hoping to win back the seats for a third time, while the Congress is trying to make up ground in the state. Voting for the five Lok Sabha seats in Uttarakhand will take place on Friday.
Voting will begin at 7 am across 11,729 polling stations and continue until 5 pm, Additional Chief Electoral Officer Vijay Kumar Jogdande said.
In Uttarakhand, the BJP secured all five seats in the federal elections in 2014 and 2019.
Haridwar, Pauri Garhwal, Tehri Garhwal, Nainital-Udham Singh Nagar, and the one reserved seat, Almora, are the five seats that will go to polls on Friday.
The fate of 55 contenders in the race will be determined by more than 83 lakh votes.
The BJP has fielded sitting Members of Parliament from Nainital-Udham Singh Nagar, Tehri Garhwal, and Almora, respectively, Ajay Bhatt, Mala Rajya Laxmi Shah, and Ajay Tamta.
Uttarakhand Lok Sabha seats: The Haridwar and Pauri Garhwal candidates of the BJP have been replaced.
In place of Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank from Haridwar and Anil Baluni from Pauri Garhwal, former chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat is running for office.
Uttarakhand Lok Sabha seats: The Congress has fielded Virendra Rawat from Haridwar, the son of former chief minister Harish Rawat, Prakash Joshi from Nainital-Udham Singh Nagar, Jot Singh Gunsola from Tehri Garhwal, and Pradeep Tamta from Almora. Former PCC president Ganesh Godiyal is from Pauri Garhwal.
Although there are candidates from the Bahujan Samaj Party, Uttarakhand Kranti Dal, and other smaller parties as well as Independents, the BJP and Congress, longtime rivals, are most likely to face off in straight races for every seat.
On Wednesday night, the first round of the Lok Sabha election campaign came to a close.
The BJP’s top campaigners, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, party national president J P Nadda, and Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, staged a number of election rallies and road shows throughout the state during the nearly month-long campaign, which only began to gain traction a fortnight ago.
Before April 13, when party national secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra spoke at her first electoral rallies in Ramnagar and Roorkee in favor of her party’s candidates from Haridwar, Nainital-Udhamsingh Nagar, and Pauri Garhwal seats, the Congress’s star campaigners had vanished from the scene.
She urged voters to support change and charged that, over the previous ten years, the Modi administration has done nothing but deceive the public.
Cast your ballot sensibly. Should you not, your day-to-day hardships will persist for an additional five years,” she said.
On the other hand, the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) urged Modi to be given another term to construct a developed India, of which Uttarakhand is a crucial component. They also emphasized the measures that the BJP-led NDA government has made in the last ten years to improve the state’s road, rail, and aviation connectivity infrastructure.
While the BJP’s promise of a stable government in the hill state may succeed in winning over voters to the saffron party once more, political analysts here believe that the ongoing exodus from the hills, unemployment, and inflation are the main causes of resentment among the populace.
They predicted that there will be a fierce contest between the BJP and the Congress in certain seats, such as Pauri Garhwal and Haridwar. Godiyal, a congress candidate, has been running a vigorous campaign, claiming that there are insiders and outsiders in Pauri Garhwal. His polling places also received sizable attendance.
The experts went on to say that even though BJP candidate Trivendra Rawat has an advantage over his opponent in terms of experience, Haridwar’s demographic, which includes a sizable minority and Dalit vote, may not be easy for him to win because Harish Rawat, a Congress veteran who won the seat in 2009, is doing everything in his power to guarantee his son’s victory.
“If the Modi factor works again as it did in 2014 and 2019 overriding all other factors, the BJP will obviously reap the benefits but if unemployment, inflation, continued migration from the hills and performance of BJP MPs over the past 10 years outweigh the national issues, the Congress will gain,” Jaisingh Rawat, a political analyst, stated.