Campaign ends, voting tomorrow

NEW DELHI
Oct. 11: The hustle and the bustle of electioneering in three poll-bound states — Haryana, Maharashtra and Arunachal Pradesh — drew to a close on Sunday. Voting for Assembly seats in all three states is scheduled for Tuesday.
The polls are significant for the leading political parties in the fray as they are being held just some months after the Lok Sabha elections. So all will wait with bated breath once the results start trickling in after counting is held on October 22.
With campaigning coming to an end, the Election Commission directed that political workers who are not residents of a constituency should leave the area.
It said: “Presence of political functionaries, party workers, procession functionaries and campaign functionaries who have been brought from outside the constituency and who are not voters of the constituency, should not continue to remain present in the constituency after campaign ends.”
Moreover, the Election Commission directed the district to ensure that party functionaries should be asked to leave a constituency a immediately with electioneering ending.
In Haryana, the Congress will be hoping to return to power in the 90-member Assembly.
The Haryana government is presently led by the Congress. For the BJP, the going might be a bit tough as it is not contesting the election with one-time ally, the O.P. Chautala-led INLD.
In Maharashtra, where 288 Assembly seats will witness polling, the campaigning was largely peaceful.
The state, however, witnessed a Naxalite attack in Gadchiroli on Friday when a police party was ambushed, killing 17 of them.
The outcome of results in the Amravati Assembly seat will be eagerly awaited as president Pratibha Patil’s son, Mr Rajendra Shekhawat, is contesting from here as a Congress candidate against rebel party candidate Sunil Deshmukh. The latter is the sitting MLA from this seat and is said to have the suport of Congress workers too. Among the leading campaigners for the Congress in the poll-bound states were party president Sonia Gandhi, Mr Rahul Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The BJP had Mr L.K. Advani, Mr Rajnath Singh, Ms Sushma Sward and Mr M. Venkaiah Naidu.
Source::DC