Campaigning will end on Friday for the high stakes bypolls to the Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh, with political parties leaving no stone unturned to drum up support for their candidates ahead of polling on Sunday.
In Bihar, bypolls will be held in the Araria Lok Sabha constituency and the two Assembly constituencies of Jehanabad and Bhabua. Counting of all the seats will be conducted on March 14.
Uttar Pradesh
The bypolls were necessitated after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya vacated the Gorakhpur and Phulpur seats, respectively, following their election to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council.
For the BJP, Gorakhpur is significant as it is the bastion of the chief minister, who has represented the seat in the Lok Sabha five times. Prior to Yogi Adityanath, the seat was thrice represented in Parliament by his mentor, Yogi Avaidyanath.
Phulpur, once the bastion of the Congress and represented by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, witnessed a saffron surge in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, when Maurya won the seat.
The byelections are expected to witness a triangular contest between the ruling BJP, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Congress.
The saffron party has fielded Kaushalendra Singh Patel from Phulpur and Upendra Dutt Shukla from Gorakhpur against the SP's Pravin Nishad and Nagendra Pratap Singh Patel, respectively.
Sureetha Kareem is the Congress' candidate from Gorakhpur. The party has fielded Manish Mishra from Phulpur.
Maurya said that as far as the vote share was concerned, "60 per cent is ours and the rest is for others to share."
Adityanath has termed the byelections a rehearsal for the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
According to the Election Commission, there 19.61 lakh voters in Phulpur parliamentary constituency, while there are 19.49 lakh voters in Gorakhpur.
However, this time the party faces a new challenge as the SP contestants have the backing of BSP.
BSP chief Mayawati had recently said that while her party had not fielded any candidate from Phulpur or Gorakhpur, this did not mean that party workers will not cast their votes.
"They will in fact exercise their voting rights appropriately... As per my earlier directives, the BSP workers will vote for a candidate who will be in a position to defeat the BJP, and there is nothing wrong in it," Mayawati had said.
Bihar
In Araria, the RJD is fielding Sarfaraz Alam, the son of late area MP Mohammed Taslimuddin, while the BJP has put up Pradeep Kumar Singh, who had lost to Taslimuddin in 2014.
The JD(U) decided against contesting the Araria election and instead is supporting the BJP. The RJD is contesting the Jehanabad Assembly bypoll, while it is offering support to its alliance partner, the Congress, in Bhabua.