NEW DELHI: The Election Commission will on Saturday announce the dates for the upcoming elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Mizoram. The poll body may also announce the dates for elections in Telangana where the assembly was dissolved last month.
The EC will be holding a press conference to list out the details at 12:30 pm on Saturday.
Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao also dissolved the Assembly nearly nine months before its term was to end paving its way for elections in the state. The Lok Sabha elections are due to be held in April or May 2019.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress are the key players in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. BJP has been ruling Madhya Pradesh since 2003 after ousting the Digvijaya Singh’s Congress government from power. In Rajasthan, the BJP has been in power since 2013 when it swept the polls by bagging 163 of the 200 assembly seats under the leadership of present Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje.
Sources in the election body said that the entire election exercise will be completed by the first week of December. While polls in Chhattisgarh are likely to be held in two phases, elections in the other states might see polling in one phase, they said.
All major parties have already started making aggressive pitches ahead of the state elections.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is visiting Rajasthan’s Ajmer where he will hold a rally.
Both BJP chief Amit Shah and Congress president Rahul Gandhi will be in Madhya Pradesh, where the BJP has been in power since 2013. Mr Shah will formally launch the BJP’s mass contact campaign in the crucial Malwa-Nimad region of Madhya Pradesh to woo voters especially traders, tribals and farmers.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi too will be on a day-long tour of Madhya Pradesh today, during which he will attend an event organised by a tribal organisation and also address a public meeting.
Earlier this week, Dalit leader Mayawati gave a shocker to the Congress as she ruled out any alliance with the party in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Last month, she had ditched the party in Chhattisgarh. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief, however, left the window open for a tie-up in the 2019 national election, for which the opposition plans to join forces against the BJP.