Election Phase 5: High-profile candidates, key seats, major battles in 6 states, 2 UTs

With nearly 70 per cent of polling completed, six states and two Union Territories will vote for 49 Lok Sabha seats in the fifth phase of the general elections on May 20.

Among these are 14 seats in Uttar Pradesh, including the keenly-watched constituencies of Amethi and Rae Bareli. It will be interesting to see if Smriti Irani can manage to retain the former Congress bastion of Amethi, which she wrested from Rahul Gandhi the last time, but all eyes will be on the latter’s performance in Rae Bareli, another Gandhi-Nehru family pocket borough vacated by his mother Sonia Gandhi, who has moved on to Rajya Sabha.

Maharashtra will vote for the all-important Mumbai seats in its last phase, while voting will enter the high-stakes South Bengal as West Bengal votes in its fifth of seven phases. Bihar will enter its fifth phase too while Odisha and Jharkhand will enter their second of four phases.

In Odisha, simultaneous elections will be held in 35 Assembly segments as well.

In the two Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, the latter will vote for its single Lok Sabha seat while J-K will have former Chief Minister and National Conference (NC) vice-president Omar Abdullah taking on another former MP Fayaz Ahmad Mir of the PDP.

Here is more about the seats that will go to polls in the fifth phase, the major candidates, and the exciting battles to look forward to.

UTTAR PRADESH

Constituencies going to polls: 14 of 80 (Mohanlalganj, Lucknow, Raebareli, Amethi, Jalaun, Jhansi, Hamirpur, Banda, Fatehpur, Kaushambi, Barabanki, Faizabad, Kaiserganj, Gonda)

The fifth phase of polling in UP will see the electoral battlefield shifting from the western parts of the state, where elections concluded during the earlier phases, to the Awadh and eastern regions. Of the 14 seats going to polls on May 20, the BJP had swept all but one — former Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s Rae Bareli — in the 2019 polls, with its most prized catch being the Amethi constituency where Smriti Irani defeated Rahul Gandhi.

This time around, though, the saffron party has been finding the contest tough given the alliance between the Samajwadi Party and the Congress that has been leading an aggressive poll campaign capitalizing on the growing discontent among voters on issues of crippling inflation, growing unemployment and deepening agrarian distress.

This phase onwards, the electoral contests will begin to shift from the state’s Awadh region towards the economically impoverished Purvanchal, where caste affiliations play a vital role in deciding poll battles. Retaining hold over these seats would be critical to Narendra Modi’s ambition of taking his party beyond the 370-seat mark and his NDA coalition beyond the 400-seat mark in the 543-member Lok Sabha.

The Congress has pulled a surprise in the Nehru-Gandhi family strongholds of Amethi and Rae Bareli by fielding family loyalist KL Sharma and Rahul Gandhi on the two seats, respectively. It was previously anticipated that Rahul, if he chooses to contest from a seat in UP besides his sitting seat of Kerala’s Wayanad, will do so from Amethi, against Irani. However, he has entered the poll fray from Rae Bareli, which has been vacated by Sonia who is now a Rajya Sabha member. Rahul will face Dinesh Pratap Singh of the BJP in Rae Bareli while Irani will have to make peace with her contest against KL Sharma, formerly Sonia’s MP-representative in Rae Bareli.

Union minister Rajnath Singh is seeking re-election from the Lucknow seat where he is tipped for an easy win against the SP’s Ravidas Mehrotra. The BJP’s other notable candidates in this phase include Union ministers Kaushal Kishore in Mohanlalganj, Niranjan Jyoti in Fatehpur, and Bhanu Pratap Singh Verma in Jalaun.

In the Kaiserganj seat, where it was faced with a tough call on whether or not to field incumbent MP and strongman Brij Bhushan Saran Singh, accused of sexually harassing women wrestlers, the party found middle ground by giving the ticket to its tainted leader’s son, Karan Bhushan Singh, who will now face the SP’s Ram Bhagat Mishra.

In the Barabanki constituency, where BJP’s incumbent MP Upendra Rawat courted controversy following a video that purportedly showed him in a compromising position with a woman, the saffron party has fielded a fresh face, Rajrani Rawat, who is caught in a pitched poll battle against the Congress’s Tanuj Punia.

The fifth phase is also critical for the BJP, as it would also see Faizabad, the constituency which includes Ayodhya, site of the recently inaugurated Ram Mandir, going to polls. In the 2022 UP Assembly polls, the BJP faced tough electoral battles against the SP across the five Assembly segments that collectively form the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat, and though the party bagged four of these, the victory margins of its candidates had been worryingly slim.

The SP has now pulled a surprise by breaking with convention and fielding a Dalit candidate, nine-time legislator and Pasi leader, Audhesh Prasad, on a General seat. Prasad faces the BJP’s Lallu Singh, who had won the Faizabad seat in 2014 and 2019 and is currently battling anti-incumbency as well as voter discontent on a string of issues, including rampant demolitions that preceded the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.

MAHARASHTRA

Constituencies going to polls: 13 of 48 (Dhule, Dindori, Nashik, Palghar, Bhiwandi, Kalyan, Thane, Mumbai North, Mumbai North West, Mumbai North East, Mumbai North Central, Mumbai South Central, Mumbai South)

The fifth phase of polling would conclude elections across the 48 constituencies of Maharashtra. Of the state’s 13 Lok Sabha seats that go to polls on May 20, the most high-stakes battles between the Maha Vikas Agadhi (MVA) coalition of the Congress, the Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar factions of the Shiv Sena and the NCP, respectively, and the Mahayuti coalition of the BJP, the Eknath Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar’s NCP camp, are being fought across the constituencies that fall in the Mumbai-Thane region.

The fifth phase will see two high profile electoral debuts. Union minister Piyush Goyal is fighting his first direct election from the saffron citadel of Mumbai North where he is pitted against Congress’s Bhushan Patil while advocate Ujjwal Nikam, the high profile prosecutor in a slew of terror cases, including the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case and the 26/11 terror attack case, is finally entering politics and the electoral arena from the Mumbai North Central constituency against Mumbai Regional Congress chief and four-term Dharavi legislator Varsha Gaikwad. Chief minister Eknath Shinde’s son Shrikant Shinde will also try to retain his sitting seat of Kalyan against Vaishali Darekar Rane, candidate of Uddhav Thackeray’s faction of the Shiv Sena.

The fifth phase will also settle the question of which camp of the splintered Shiv Sena — one led by CM Shinde and the other by Bal Thackeray’s son and former CM Uddhav Thackeray — holds sway over Mumbai-Thane, the stronghold of the erstwhile united Shiv Sena. Thackeray had prevailed over allies, Congress, and NCP founder Sharad Pawar, to give his party a majority of seats in Mumbai and Thane in order to prove that he is the real heir to his father’s political legacy in the country’s financial capital.

Amol Gajanan Kirtikar, son of Sena stalwart Gajanan Kirtikar, and Sanjay Dina Patil have been fielded from the Mumbai North West and Mumbai North East constituencies, respectively, as candidates of Shiv Sena (UBT) against Ravindra Waikar of Shinde’s Sena faction and the BJP’s Mihir Kotecha, respectively. The Mumbai South Central and the Mumbai South constituencies are also set for a direct contest between candidates of the two Sena camps. Shiv Sena (UBT) has fielded senior leader Anil Desai against Rahul Shewale of Shinde’s Sena in the Mumbai South Central constituency while senior leader Arvind Sawant will try to wrest the Mumbai South seat for Thackeray’s party in a challenge against Shinde Sena’s Yamini Jadhav.

WEST BENGAL

Constituencies going to polls: 7 of 42 (Bongaon, Barrackpore, Howrah, Uluberia, Serampore, Hooghly, Arambag)

With this phase, the Lok Sabha elections enter South Bengal — still largely a TMC territory, which the BJP is trying hard to wrest and had been successful to quite an extent in 2019 — as key constituencies in the districts of North 24-Parganas, Howrah, Hooghly, and parts of Nadia and West Midnapore go to polls. Notably, the TMC won most of these areas in the 2021 Assembly polls.

The key issues that have dominated the electioneering in these constituencies are CAA, lack of industrialisation and employment opportunities apart from corruption, women’s safety, and price rise.

Both the TMC and the BJP have aggressively pitched their respective CAA narratives in the Matua-dominated constituencies of Bongaon, Hooghly, and Arambag. In the industrial belts of Barrackpore, Howrah, Uluberia, and Serampore, the parties exchanged barbs over the lack of industrialisation and growing unemployment.

In Bongaon, Matua leader Shantanu Thakur will try to retain the seat for the BJP. He faces the TMC’s Biswajit Das, who made a brief visit to the saffron party in 2019 before returning to the TMC fold two years later. Das was elected to the state Assembly from Bongaon Uttar, a segment under the constituency, in 2011 and 2016, as a TMC candidate.

In Barrackpore, the contest is mainly between two arch political rivals, Arjun Singh of the BJP and Partha Bhowmick of the TMC. Singh had won the seat on a BJP ticket in 2019. Later, he joined the TMC, ostensibly after burying the hatchets with Bhowmick. The duo turned their guns against each other once again after Singh became a turncoat after being denied a TMC ticket from Barrackpore.

Singh defeated former TMC leader and two-time MP from this seat, Dinesh Trivedi, in 2019, while Bhowmik is a three-term MLA from Naihati, a segment under this constituency. Bhowmik is also the North 24-Parganas district president of the Trinamool Youth Congress.

Hooghly is in for a starry contest as popular actor and TV show anchor Rachna Banerjee of the TMC faces off against fellow actor and the BJP’s sitting MP Locket Chatterjee. The latter had a convincing win over TMC’s two-time MP Ratna De Nag in 2019 and has since emerged as one of the visible faces of the saffron party in the state.

In Serampore, three-time MP Kalyan Banerjee of the TMC will look to defend his turf, and so will his party colleague, former footballer, and another three-time MP Prasun Banerjee, in Howrah. Kalyan Banerjee is pitted against his former son-in-law Kabir Shankar Bose of the BJP.

The story is similar in Uluberia, where Sajda Ahmed will seek to defend the seat she took over from her late husband Sultan Ahmed, who represented it from 2009 until his death in 2017. Sajda won the 2018 bypoll and held on to the seat in 2019 with a convincing victory.

ODISHA

Constituencies going to polls: 5 of 21 (Bargarh, Sundargarh, Bolangir, Kandhamal, Aska)

Simultaneous polls will be held in the 35 assembly segments under the five Lok Sabha constituencies

Stakes are high for both the BJP and the BJD in the second phase of polls in Odisha, with three of the seats being held by the saffron party and two by the state’s ruling party.

The heavily forested and migration-prone constituency of Bargarh has an interesting history, with candidates of the Congress, BJD, and the BJP being chosen by the people over the past three general elections, in that order. Hence, which way they will swing this time is anybody’s guess.

In neighbouring Bolangir, it’s “battle royale” as usual as two members of the erstwhile royal family of Patnagarh face off once again. The BJP has retained as its candidate sitting MP Sangeeta Kumar Singh Deo, wife of KV Singh Deo, the titular Maharaja of Patnagarh and a former state minister. Sangeeta won the Bolangir seat in 1998, 1999, 2004, and 2019, losing it to her brother-in-law Kalikesh Narayan Singh Deo of the BJD in 2009 and 2014. In 2019, she defeated Kalikesh by 19,516 votes.

In Sundargarh, two-time MP and Minister of Tribal Affairs Jual Oram of the BJP will seek a third term, while in the other tribal constituency of Kandhamal, a traditional BJD bastion, Achyutananda Samanta will look at a second term.

Interestingly, many of the segments under these Lok Sabha constituencies had voted for the BJD in the Assembly polls in 2019. So, which way Odisha will swing this time will be interesting to watch.

BIHAR

Constituencies going to polls: 5 of 40 (Sitamarhi, Madhubani, Muzaffarpur, Saran, Hajipur)

In Bihar, as also in Jharkhand, the BJP prepares to protect its turf in the fifth phase of Lok Sabha polls, as the ruling alliance had, in the 2019 general elections, won all the eight seats going to polls in these two states. Of the five seats in Bihar, the BJP won three in the 2019 polls, while its NDA partners bagged Sitamarhi and Hajipur.

The electoral battle in Hajipur this time is a high-stakes battle for Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) chief Chirag Paswan, who is trying to claim the legacy of his late father Ram Vilas Paswan. The Hajipur seat has traditionally been represented by Ram Vilas Paswan, and Chirag will contest the seat for the first time. This will mark Chirag’s first electoral test after his father’s death in October 2020.

The fifth phase will also witness the rise of another scion in Bihar politics, Rohini Acharya, daughter of former chief minister and RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav. Rohini is contesting the polls from Saran against senior BJP leader and former Union minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy. The importance of the contest can be gauged from the fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself landed in Saran a few days ago to campaign for Rudy and sought a third consecutive term for Rudy from the people.

JHARKHAND

Constituencies going to polls: 3 of 14 (Chatra, Kodarma, Hazaribagh)

A crucial electoral contest is also taking place in Jharkhand, where the BJP is hoping to win once again the Hazaribagh seat, a stronghold of former BJP leader and Union minister Yashwant Sinha.

The contest has become interesting after the BJP decided not to give a ticket to Yashwant’s son Jayant Sinha, who represented this constituency in 2014 and 2019.

Yashwant had held this constituency since 1998, until Jayant took over and represented it for two terms. Now, Yashwant is one of the most vocal critics of the present government.

In Kodarma, Minister of State for Education Annpurna Devi Yadav will be looking at a second term as MP.

JAMMU AND KASHMIR

Constituency going to polls: 1 of 5 (Baramulla)

The contest in Baramulla was expected to be a cakewalk for National Conference’s Omar Abdullah until a fortnight ago, but the entry of jailed Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) chief Engineer Rashid into the electoral fray has infused much excitement in the poll battle.

Lodged in Delhi’s Tihar jail for the past five years over allegations of money laundering connected with terror activity, Rashid, a former construction engineer and native of Langate (Kupwara district), is a popular figure in the Valley and is often hailed by his supporters as the ‘Voice of Kashmir’.

As such, his entry into the poll fray has caused anxiety among supporters of Abdullah and his challenger, BJP ally Sajad Lone of the People’s Conference, in equal measure, with opinion divided over whose votes Rashid would eat into.

LADAKH

Constituency going to polls: 1 of 1 (Ladakh)

Ladakh has been simmering with discontent and anger against the BJP ever since it was carved out of the erstwhile state of J&K following the abrogation of Article 370 and turned into a Union Territory without a legislature.

Recurring protests by the people of Ladakh, including celebrity innovator Sonam Wangchuk, on a host of issues, most prominent among them the demand to list the UT under the Constitution’s Sixth Schedule, have cast a long shadow over the BJP’s victory prospects in this constituency that comprises of the Muslim-dominated parts of Kargil and Buddhist regions of Ladakh.

The BJP, which had won the Ladakh seat for the first time in 2014 and retained it with a bigger margin in 2019, has benched its sitting MP Jamyang Tsering Namgyal and fielded Tashi Gyalson, Chief Executive Councillor of the Ladakh Hill Development Council, as its candidate. The Congress, backed by ally National Conference (NC), had been hoping to score an easy victory in Ladakh on the back of its sustained campaign for granting Sixth Schedule status to the UT.

The Grand Old Party’s candidate, Tsering Namgyal, however, suffered a setback recently with a slew of NC leaders from the Kargil region rebelling against their party over the alliance with the Congress. The NC rebels have backed the candidature of Haji Mohammad Haneefa, turning the Ladakh poll battle into a triangular contest and triggering fears in the Congress and NC camp of a possible division of Muslim votes from Kargil, which may end up giving the BJP an edge.