1.43 crore voters to pick 7 new MPs today

New Delhi: As the city goes to polls in all the seven Lok Sabha constituencies on Sunday, indications are there that a direct fight will be held between the BJP and the Congress in at least four seats while three others will witness a triangular fight between the two parties and newbie Aam Aadmi Party.

Of the over 1.43 crore voters in Delhi, there are 78,73,022 are male and 64,42,762 female, while 669 belong to the third gender. The number of overseas electors stands at 40 while count of service voters is 11,005.

Voting will begin at 7 am and is scheduled to go on till 6 pm. The 48-hour silence period from 6 pm on Friday to 6 pm on Sunday will also be observed as “dry day”.

Of the 13,819 polling booths, special paramilitary forces have been deployed in 523 polling locations which have been identified as “critical”. The Delhi Election Commission has made arrangements for web casting and provided CCTV facilities to ensure free and fair elections.

These election also saw both the Congress and the AAP kept people guessing for about two months about a possible alliance. Flooded with questions from party workers, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal had explained that an alliance with Congress was important to defeat the Modi-Shah combine in 33 Lok Sabha seats (Delhi-7, Punjab-13, Haryana-10, Goa-2 and Chandigarh-1).

However, with Congress wanting an alliance only in Delhi and AAP insisting that the deal should be for at least 18 seats in Delhi, Haryana and Chandigarh, the talks ended in failure, thus making a three-way contest inevitable in at least three constituencies.

While the BJP’s campaign revolved around the party’s high-pitched nationalism narrative and the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Congress kept him in the cross hairs and sought to hard sell its minimum income guarantee scheme, Nyay. The AAP, on the other hand, focussed on the demand for full statehood for Delhi.

The main focus of the elections in Delhi will be on the Northeast constituency which is going to witness a triangular fight between Pradesh Congress president and three time chief minister Sheila Dikshit, BJP State unit chief and sitting MP Manoj Tiwari and AAP’s Dilip Pandey. While Mr Tiwari is a famous Bojpuri singer, Mr Pandey is said to be a key strategist of the AAP.

The East Delhi constituency is also going to witness a triangular fight between BJP candidate Gautam Gambhir, Congress’s Arvinder Singh Lovely and AAP’s Aatishi.

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