A high-stakes battle awaits 92 constituencies across 11 states and Union Territories as polls will open for the third phase of Lok Sabha elections on Tuesday. All eyes will be on the Bharatiya Janata Party specifically after it won an overwhelming majority of these seats, including all in Gujarat, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, in the last election.
Polling will be held on all the 25 seats of Gujarat, except Surat which the saffron party won unopposed, and 11 seats in Maharashtra, 10 seats in Uttar Pradesh, the remaining 14 of the 28 in Karnataka, seven in Chhattisgarh, five in Bihar, four each in Assam and West Bengal, and all two in Goa.
Two seats in the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu and nine seats in Madhya Pradesh, including Betul where elections were deferred, will also go to polls on Tuesday.
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah will cast their vote on Tuesday in Gujarat's Ahmedabad. Both the BJP bigwigs arrived in their home state on Monday night.
- While Modi will poll his vote in a polling booth located on the premises of Nishan Higher Secondary School in Ranip area, Shah will vote at a booth in Naranpura area
- Tight security has been put in place outside the polling booth in Ahmedabad's Ranip, where PM Modi will cast his vote later today.
- Focus will be particularly on Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav's family members in Uttar Pradesh where Dimple Yadav is aiming to retain her Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat which she won in the bypoll following the death of her father-in-law.
- Ram Gopal Yadav's son, Akshaya Yadav will also try to reclaim the Firozabad seat, which he had won in 2014 while Aditya Yadav, son of Shivpal Yadav will make his electoral debut from the Badaun Lok Sabha seat.
- Ahead of the polling, Ram Gopal Yadav said he will cast his vote at Saifai Primary School, along with his family as he urged voters to "remove BJP to save the Constitution, protect reservations, for employment and alleviate poverty."
Over 1,300 candidates, including around 120 women, are in the fray in the third phase of Lok Sabha polls with bigwigs including Amit Shah (Gandhinagar), Jyotiraditya Scindia (Guna), Mansukh Mandaviya (Porbandar), Parshottam Rupala (Rajkot), Pralhad Joshi (Dharwad) and SP Singh Baghel (Agra).
- As many as 17.24 crore registered voters, including 8.39 crore females, are expected to poll at 1.85 lakh polling stations manned by 18.5 lakh officials.