Bhopal: Election campaign cacophony in three state legislative Assembly segments and one Lok Sabha constituency witnessing bypolls came to an end on Wednesday evening as per schedule of the ECI. No violence was reported during campaign from any part of the constituencies.
The polling will be held from 7 am to 6 pm on October 30 while counting of votes will take place on November 2. The results are expected the same day.
There are 26,50,004 voters in all the four constituencies who are expected to exercise their franchise on as many as 3,944 polling booths. Of the polling booths 865 have been identified as sensitive booths. Webcasting will be done to monitor voting at 874 polling booths while CCTV will be installed at 361 booths for monitoring of the voting. As many as 10,027 electronic voting machines (EVMs) will be used for voting, as per officials.
Charges and counter charges flew thick and fast mainly between the ruling party BJP and the Opposition Congress. Both the parties lodged several complaints to Election Commission of India (ECI) regarding alleged violation of Model code of conduct related to election.
Prestige of both the BJP and the Congress is at stake in the bypolls as BJP held Khandwa Lok Sabha seat and Raigaon (SC) state assembly seat with it while Congress represented Prithvipur and Jobat (ST) assembly constituencies in the state assembly.
As far as issues are concerned the BJP campaign of which was led by chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and state BJP president VD Sharma, talked of absence of leadership in the Congress in the state as well as at the Centre. The party also raised the issue of alleged misrule during the then Congress government headed by the then chief minister Kamal Nath.
Other BJP leaders who took part in the campaign include Union ministers Narendra Singh Tomar, Prahlad Patel and Jyotiraditya Scindia, BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, former union minister Uma Bharti besides ministerial colleagues of Chouhan, several other MLAs and MPs.
On its part Congress raised the issue of alleged misrule and corruption in the BJP government machinery, shortage of fertilizer, power crisis, bad road condition across the state and blamed it also for unemployment and tribals and downtrodden section’s miserable condition in the state.
The Congress campaign was led by former chief minister Kamal Nath, Rajya Sabha member Digvijaya Singh, party’s MP state affairs in charge Mukul Wasnik, former ministers Jeetu Patwari, Sajjan Singh Verma, Vijaya Laxmi Sadho and others.
During the campaign chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan spent at least one night each in the houses of SC/ST people in Alirajpur, Raigaon, Prithvipur and Khandwa.
It’s just a coincidence that all the four seats which are witnessing bypolls fell vacant due to death of the public representatives on these seats, that too due to Covid-19 - Nankumar Singh Chauhan, Lok Sabha member from Khandwa constituency, Jugal Kishore Bagri MLA from Raigaon (SC), Kalawati Bhuria MLA from Jobat (ST) and Brijendra Singh Rathore MLA from Prithvipur constituency.
On Tuesday, Election Commission of India made an appeal to people to download on their smart phones cVIGIL App and lodged their complaints to the commission on violations of model code of conduct or any malpractices and take part in free, fair and ethical election process.
