Eyeing electoral triumph, BJP gears up to celebrate

Mumbai: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — buoyed by exit poll predictions of an easy victory in Maharashtra and Haryana — has already kicked off celebratory preparations, even as the counting of votes is to commence on Thursday morning.

According to state BJP sources, the party made ‘victory’ preparations at its headquarters at Nariman Point. Over 10,000 bundi laddus will be kept at hand for party workers and officials to celebrate the “expected victory”.

Meanwhile, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and his wife Amruta  — following in the footsteps of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had visited the Kedarnath shrine in Uttarakhand a day after campaigning for the Lok Sabha elections — offered prayers at the Himalayan site on Wednesday.

Sharing pictures from his visit, the chief minister tweeted, “Took darshan and blessings at Kedarnath temple this morning. Har Har Mahadev! (sic)”

The ruling BJP-Shiv Sena combine is arrayed against the opposition Congress-Nationalist Co-ngress Party (NCP) with the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi being the dominant player among the other parties.

Nearly 6.5 lakh polling personnel were deployed at 96,661 polling booths across the state on election day. The state has 8,98,39,600 eligible voters, including 1,06,76,013 in the age group of 18 to 25 years.

Most exit polls, released immediately after polling ended on Monday even-ing, gave the ruling alli-ance a comfortable majority in the 288-member Assembly.

The counting of votes will take place at 269 locations from 8 am, Election Commission officials said.

In Maharashtra, more than 25,000 election officials and personnel will supervise the counting process and each constituency will have around 14 to 20 tables depending on the number of polling booths. Each table will have one supervisor, two assistants and one micro observer.