By IANS,
Lucknow : The highly sensitive Maoist belt of Uttar Pradesh will be among the 52 constituencies voting in the penultimate phase of the seven-phase assembly polls Thursday.
Of the 100,000 personnel of the central paramilitary forces and provincial armed constabulary (PAC) detailed for the phase, 10,000 have been posted in and around the 680 villages where Maoist rebels hold sway in the three districts of Mirzapur, Chandauli and Sonbhadra.
The area, bordering the states of Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, is identified as part of the larger Maoist corridor stretching right from Nepal down to Andhra Pradesh.
The poll will be held across nine districts – Varanasi, Allahabad, Ghazipur, Kaushambi, Jaunpur, Sant Ravidas Nagar besides the Maoist-affected Mirzapur, Chandauli and Sonbhadra.
As many as 163 million voters are eligible to cast the ballot to elect 52 representatives from among 738 contestants. There will be 15,428 polling centres where 17,800 electronic voting machines have been installed for the jumbo exercise.
The state’s principal home secretary K. Chandramauli regards this belt as “highly vulnerable” and “more tricky” than all other parts of Uttar Pradesh.
“Unlike several crime prone and criminal infested areas, where you are dealing with known and identified outlaws, the situation in the Maoist areas is different – because the enemy is neither identified nor known,” Chandramauli told IANS.
“Since we have launched a crackdown on Maoists, they could retaliate by resorting to violence in any pocket against which we need to guard.”
No wonder elaborate security arrangements have been made not only deep inside the sparsely populated and densely forested areas in the three Maoist affected districts, but also along the vast open inter-state border.
A special helicopter is being pressed into service to keep an aerial vigil and provide instant support to the forces on ground.
The constituencies in this phase are extremely crucial to Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party as it had won 20 seats in the 2002 assembly poll. It was followed by Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) with 12, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at 11 and Apna Dal at three. The Congress and Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) had won one seat each and one independent was elected.
Prominent among those locked in key contests in this phase are state BJP president Keshrinath Tripathi as well as Apna Dal chief Sone Lal Patel.
A total of 138 of the 785 candidates in the fray are facing criminal charges. Among them are: Sushil Kumar of the BSP with 25 pending criminal cases, Chotelal Vishwakarma of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (24), Suheldeo of BSP (17), Rajesh Yadav – independent (15), Dinesh Pal of RLD (11) Vijay Kumar of Samajwadi Party (11), Khalid Azim alias Ashraf of Samajwadi Party (8), Shashikant Rajbhar of the BJP (6) and Gulab Chand and Arjun (both Congress) six each.