By IANS
Raipur : About 62 percent of the 146,796 voters exercised their franchise Monday amid minor incidents of violence in the Maoist-infested Keshkal assembly constituency in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district.
“Almost 62 percent polling was recorded from total 150 polling centres,” Ganesh Shankar Mishra, Bastar district collector, told IANS by phone.
Mishra said there were no reports of violence from anywhere in the constituency.
However, a senior police official said Maoist guerrillas fired at a few polling booths in interior villages, but no one was injured.
“Maoists tried to terrorise the voters by firing at a few places, including a village Juganar. We recovered some landmine and pipe bombs from interiors of Keshkal,” the police officer said.
Officials said nearly 5,000 policemen, including 24 companies of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), were deployed in Keshkal as the outlawed Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) has a stronghold in the forested interior regions of the constituency.
A 24-seater police surveillance helicopter was also kept on standby for any emergency.
The by-election was necessitated because of the death of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator Mahesh Baghel in a car accident last August. The seat is reserved for a Scheduled Tribes (ST) candidate.
While the election is expected to see a direct contest between Sevakram Netam of the BJP and Budhsan Markam of the Congress, three independents are also in the fray and one of them is backed by the Shiv Sena.
The counting will be held Feb 7 at Jagdalpur, the district headquarters of Bastar.
The result of polls will be an indicator of where the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress stand before the state’s 90-member assembly goes to election later tis year in November.