Campaigning in Rajasthan ends, polling on Saturday

Jaipur: The high-pitch electoral campaign in Rajasthan for the November 25 assembly elections came to an end Wednesday evening with the BJP going all out to wrest power from the Congress, which is trying to end the state’s anti-incumbency trend.

While the ruling Congress focused its election campaign mainly on the works and performance of the Ashok Gehlot government, its schemes and programmes and also banked on the promise of seven guarantees if the party retains power, the BJP attacked the Congress on issues such as crime against women, appeasement, corruption and paper leak.

Rajasthan has a total of 200 assembly seats but polling will be held in 199 seats the Congress candidate from Sriganganagar’s Karanpur seat Gurmeet Singh Konoor passed away. There are 5,25,38,105 voters in the 199 assembly constituencies.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, party leaders Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, Gehlot and other conducted a series of election meetings while Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the election campaign for the BJP and held multiple meetings. He also held road shows in Bikaner and Jaipur.

BJP president JP Nadda, Union ministers Amit Shah, Smriti Irani and Rajnath Singh, and chief ministers Yogi Adityanath (Uttar Pradesh), Shivraj Singh Chouhan (Madhya Pradesh) and Himanta Biswa Sarma (Assam) among others also addressed public meetings in various constituencies across the state.

An official of the election department said the campaigning ended at 6 pm. Polling will be held from 7 am to 6 pm on Saturday and results will be declared on December 3.

According to the regulations, there will be no election-related public meeting or procession or campaigning on television.

Chief electoral officer Praveen Gupta said if any person violates the provisions, he or she will be punished with imprisonment of up to two years or fine or both.

The Election Commission has directed that any political person who is not a voter or candidate of that constituency or is not an MP or MLA cannot stay in that constituency after the election campaign is over.

PTI