Lucknow, May 8
A large number of voters preferred to stay at home resulting in a bare 42.3 per cent turnout in the byelection for the Rae Bareli seat today.
With the Congress and Samajwadi party exchanging charges and counter charges tension had mounted on the eve of the election. Yet the polling remained largely peaceful
Chief Electoral officer Anuj Bishnoi said he was yet to receive detailed reports from the district and thus was not in a position to say if any repoll would be required.
However, he admitted to having received several complaints from both the Congress and Sanmajwadi party but refused to comment on the authenticity of them till they had been examined.
There was one stray incident in Amrawan where an SP party office-bearer Jai Prakash Bajpai was hospitalised after he suffered gun shot injuries in the arm. According to Secretary Home R.N. Srivastava, the incident was not related to the polls and was perhaps a dispute over some contract. However, he did not comment over how unnumbered vehicles were moving around in the district despite heavy police bandobust. The culprits are said to have come on one such vehicle.
While there was heavy presence of security personnel both CRPF and UP police, the enthusiasm amongst the voters was clearly missing. The polling stations wore a deserted look and polling officials waited patiently for voters to find their way to the booths.
The only pocket where there was relative enthusiasm was amongst the voters who had queued up outside the polling station at Kahar ka Adda. This is a predominantly a Muslim pocket in Rae Bareli city where Sonia Gandhi had paid homage at the grave of Islamic scholar Ali Miyan Nadwi on the day of her nomination.
Voters came out early before the sun’s blaze became unbearable. But then when the sun shone the brightest, the polling dipped to almost nil and picked up once more towards the end of the day.
Even the Bachrawan Assembly constituency did not have a good response. The Samajwadi party had high hopes from here as their candidate Raj kumar Chaudhury belongs to this place.
Observers pointed out that there was virtually no door-to-door campaigning especially by the Congress party. “Big leaders and public meetings are alright but do not add up to much. In the ultimate analysis the challenge is to bring the voter to the polling booth”, remarked an observer.
Commenting on the low polling Congress spokesperson Akhilesh Pratap Singh said that as it was a “one-sided election” the voters had become complacent regarding voting.
Byelections in the constituency always gets a lackluster response pointed out Dr Ram Bahadur Verma, political scientist who teaches at the local Feroze Gandhi Inter College. Verma has been observing elections in Rae Bareli since the ’60s.
According to him the first by poll necessitated by the untimely death of Feroze Gandhi in 1960 recorded 27.6 per cent voting. The second byelection was in 1980 when Indira Gandhi resigned to contest from Medak. The election that brought Arun Nehru to Parliament for the first time had a poll percentage of a mere 28 per cent.
Compared to these previous byelections the polling percentage was not too bad, but it remains to be seen whether the Congress can fulfill its objective of increasing the victory margin of Congress President Sonia Gandhi from 2.5 lakhs recorded in 2004.
