Madhya Pradesh: Voting underway for Assembly polls

Voting across 64,626 polling booths began at 7 a.m. and will end at 6 p.m. Of the 64,626 polling booths, 17,032 have been categorised as sensitive.

Bhopal: Voting for the 230 Assembly seats in Madhya Pradesh is currently underway on Friday.

Voting across 64,626 polling booths began at 7 a.m. and will end at 6 p.m. Of the 64,626 polling booths, 17,032 have been categorised as sensitive. There are a total 5.59 crore registered voters in Madhya Pradesh, of of which 2.87 crore are male and 2.71 crore female, while 1,292 others are of the third gender.

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According to Election Commission of India, there are a total 2,533 candidates in the fray, including Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan as well as Union Ministers Narendra Singh Tomar, Faggan Singh Kulaste and Prahlad Patel. Former Chief Minister Kamal Nath and his son Nakul Nath cast their votes in Chhindwara, while state Home Minister Narottam Mishra voted in Dadia. BJP General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya is contesting from Indore-1 and three Lok Sabha MPs of BJP — Rakesh Singh, Ganesh Singh and Riti Pathak — are also in the fray.

Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh’s son and former state minister Jaivardhan Singh and former chief minister Arjun Singh’s son Ajay Singh are contesting from their traditional Raghogarh and Churhat seats, respectively.

The main parties in the fray are Congress, the BJP, Aam Aadmi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP). In the last Assembly elections held in 2018, the Congress had bagged 114 seats against the BJP’s 109 seats. The Congress had then formed the government with the help of Independent MLAs along with the SP and BSP. However, the Kamal Nath-led government collapsed within 15 months.