Many veterans in fourth phase

Pranab, Rajnath, Mulayam and Lalu among main contestants

Congress veteran Pranab Mukherjee, BJP president Rajnath Singh, SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, Bollywood bigshot Shatrughan Sinha and telly star Shekhar Suman will be fighting it out in the fourth phase of Lok Sabha polls on Thursday.

The fate of RJD chief Lalu Prasad (Pataliputra,Bihar), National Conference president Farooq Abdulla (Srinagar), Congress leader Sachin Pilot (Ajmer, Rajasthan) would also be decided from among 1,315 candidates including 119 women.

Mukherjee is fighting from Jangipur in West Bengal and Rajnath and Mulayam in  Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad and Mainpuri, respectively.

Sinha and Suman are pitted against each other at Patna Saheb.

There are other prominent leaders like BJP rebel and former chief minister Kalyan Singh, who has taken the plunge from Etah, with all out support from his one-time sworn political foe, the Samajawadi Party; Raj Babbar is contesting as a Congress candidate from Fatehpur-Sikri; and Mulayam Singh’s son Akhilesh, who is in the fray from both Kannauj and Ferozabad constituencies.

As many as 94.6 million voters will be eligible to exercise their franchise.

Votes will be cast across 1.29 lakh polling booths in eight states and Union Territories, which would be manned by over six lakh election officials.

At the end of the fourth phase, when elections would be held for 85 seats, the election process would be completed in 457 of the total 545 Lok Sabha seats. Polling to all the 25 seats in Rajasthan, 10 in Haryana and seven in Delhi will be completed at one go.

The Election Commission has set up 129,103 polling centres, to be overseen by 6,50,000 officials.

Special mobile polling stations will facilitate voters in the vast desert region of Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, the single largest state.

While polling in Bihar would conclude in this phase, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir still have a round to go. Balloting will be held on a single day in Delhi, Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab.

The last round of polling would be held on May 13 in the remaining 86 constituencies.

The  counting of votes is due May 16.

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has fielded the maximum 82 candidates followed by the Congress and BJP (70 each), Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) 21, Communist Party of India eight, Nationalist Congress Party six and RJD two. There are 609 independents.

New Delhi and Chandni Chowk constituencies in the national capital have the most number of candidates – 41 and 40 respectively. Gautam Buddh Nagar, which also includes Noida, and Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh have six women candidates each – the highest.

Millionaires and others
Among the candidates, 164 have criminal records and 259 are millionaires.

The Bahujan Samajwadi Party tops the list with 13 candidates. The Congress has 12, the BJP 10 and the Samajawadi Party has seven candidates with criminal records.

Largest number of candidates, 50, with such records are from Uttar Pradesh.

A total of 259 millionaires are contesting elections in the fourth phase.

The Congress has 49, the BSP 39, BJP 36 and the SP has 18 millionaire candidates.