Lok Sabha Elections 2024 | Over 11 crore eligible to vote across 58 seats in 6th phase, EC urges urban citizens to break trend of apathy

New Delhi: Around 11.43 crore voters are eligible to vote in the phase 6 of Lok Sabha elections on Saturday during which polling will be held in 58 seats spread across eight states and union territories even as the Election Commission asked voters in Delhi and its suburbs to shun their reluctance and exercise their franchise.

Along with the Lok Sabha polls, polling for 42 Assembly seats in Odisha will also be held simultaneously.

Voting will be held in all the ten Lok Sabha seats in Haryana, all seven in Delhi, 14 in Uttar Pradesh, eight each in Bihar and West Bengal, four in Jharkhand and one in Jammu and Kashmir. The prominent candidates included ML Khattar (Karnal), Deepender Hooda (Rohtak), Maneka Gandhi (Sultanpur) and Mehbooba Mufti (Anantnag-Rajouri).

Following continued low turnout in cities as seen in Mumbai, the EC has "specially reminded" voters in urban centres like Delhi, Gurgaon and Faridabad about their "right and duty to vote and break the trend of urban apathy". The phase 6 of 2019 polls had seen 64.4 per cent turnout.

The sixth phase of polls would see 889 candidates trying their luck. By Saturday the polling process in 28 states and union territories will be completed. In the last phase on June 1, polling in 57 seats in eight states and union territories will be held while the counting of votes will be held on June 4.

Around 11.4 lakh polling officials are deployed in 1.14 lakh polling stations in these constituencies. In this phase, the polling in Jammu and Kashmir will also conclude with the exercise in Anantnag-Rajouri seat.

The campaign for phase 6 has seen heightened rhetoric from the ruling BJP and the Opposition I.N.D.I.A. bloc.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi targeted the I.N.D.I.A claiming that there will be five Prime Ministers in five years and the internal fight has begun. On the other hand, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and other Opposition leaders claimed that they were coming to power.

In these 58 seats, Congress did not win a single seat in 2019 though it hopes to improve its standing in Delhi, Haryana, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. BJP had won 40 seats while SP won one seat, which it lost in a bypoll. BSP and BJD won four seats each while JD(U) and Trinamool Congress bagged three each. LJP, AJSU and National Conference won one each.

For the Congress, this phase is crucial as it hopes to improve its standing in Delhi and Haryana where it has been decimated in the last two polls.