By IANS
Lucknow : Millions voted Thursday in the sixth and penultimate round of staggered assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, but even by evening officials were calling the polling “low”.
Although balloting picked up after a slow and hesitant start despite the relative cool of the morning, only a third of the 16.3 million in this round had voted in the first eight hours – till about 3 p.m. Polling ended at 5 p.m.
On Thursday, voters were to pick 52 legislators from among 738 contestants spread over the nine eastern districts of Varanasi, Allahabad, Ghazipur, Jaunpur, Sant Ravidas Nagar, Mirzapur, Chandauli, Sonbhadra and Kaushambhi.
Polling is also on Thursday for two the Lok Sabha seats of Robertsganj and Mirzapur.
The remaining 59 of Uttar Pradesh’s 403 assembly constituencies will go to the polls May 8. Votes polled in the month-long polling that began April 7 will be counted May 11.
“We have estimated polling percentage of just about 33 percent at 3 p.m.,” a senior Election Commission official told IANS here.
But thanks to the heavy security deployment, particularly in the Maoist strongholds, there was complete calm.
“No untoward incident was reported from any of the constituencies,” the official said.
Uttar Pradesh Principal Home Secretary K. Chandramauli had earlier said that 680 villages spread across the three districts of Chandauli, Sonbhadra and Mirzapur had been identified as “Maoist-infested”.
Nearly 10,000 paramilitary and state police personnel were posted in and around these villages.
A Maoist attack on a polling party in the previous election in 2002 had made the authorities doubly cautious. That attack left two officials dead and a few injured.
A Border Security Force (BSF) helicopter was kept ready in Varanasi town along with commandos to tackle any emergency.
Several candidates in Thursday’s leg were embroiled in criminal cases, including those of murder.
According to a study by Election Watch, a social voluntary group headed by former retired director general of police I.C. Dwivedi, 138 candidates were facing criminal charges “that included murder, attempt to murder, extortion, kidnapping, rape and culpable homicide.
The top 10 in the list of the infamous are Sushil Kumar of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) with 25 criminal cases, Chotelal Vishwakarma of Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) (24), Suheldeo of BSP (17), Rajesh Yadav – Independent (15), Dinesh Pal of RLD (11), Vijay Kumar of Samajwadi Party (11), Khalid Azim alias Ashraf also of Samajwadi Party (8), Shashikant Rajbhar of BJP (6), Gulab Chand of the Congress (6) and Arjun, also belonging to the Congress, with six cases.
Mafia don Mukhtar Ansari, who has once been a TADA convict, is also contesting from Mohammadabad in Ghazipur as an independent backed by the Samajwadi Party.
A total of 15,428 polling centers were set up with 17,800 electronic voting machines.
This is a crucial test for several ministers in the Mulayam Singh Yadav government. Other prominent candidates are BJP state chief Kesri Nath Tripathi, All India Mahila Congress president Reeta Bahuguna Joshi and Apna Dal president Sone Lal Patel.