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GUWAHATI
More than 75% of 81.49 lakh voters exercised their franchise across four Lok Sabha constituencies of Assam in the third and final phase of polling in the northeast on Tuesday.
The polling was peaceful barring a minor scuffle in the Kokrajhar constituency, officials said. The other constituencies where elections were held were Barpeta, Dhubri, and Guwahati.
These four were the last of the 25 Lok Sabha seats across the northeast comprising eight States.
Officials of the State’s Election Department said the polling percentage would increase as many people were waiting in queues at several polling stations after 5 p.m.
The polling, affected by rainfall in the early hours, picked up momentum around noon when the skies cleared.
Accompanied by his wife and daughter, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma cast his vote in the Barpeta constituency. Phani Bhushan Choudhury, an MLA of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), is the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance’s consensus candidate here.
“There was no violence and no repolling in Assam. I thank the people for taking part in this festival of democracy with a lot of enthusiasm,” he told journalists, confident that the electorate across the region voted for the “development-oriented” NDA.
“The eastern and northeastern parts of the country will play a historical role. In Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, and Assam, we will see a landslide (mandate) for the Prime Minister (Narendra Modi),” the Chief Minister said.
Of the 25 Lok Sabha seats in the northeast, the BJP contested 18 and left seven to its NDA partners – two each for AGP and National People’s Party (Meghalaya), and one each for United People’s Party Liberal (Assam), Naga People’s Front (Manipur), and Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (Nagaland).
While the NDA showed cohesion, two or more members of the Congress-led Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance put up candidates against each other in some of the seats. Six of such seats were in Assam and one in Meghalaya.
