LS polls Phase 2: Rahul, Tharoor in fray; Hema Malini, Om Birla seek hat-trick of wins

New Delhi: The second phase of Lok Sabha polls on Friday will be a starry affair with heavyweights like Rahul Gandhi and Om Birla in the fray.

All 20 seats of Kerala will go to polls in this phase. Besides Kerala, 14 of the 28 seats in Karnataka, 13 seats in Rajasthan, 8 seats each in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, 7 seats in Madhya Pradesh, 5 seats each in Assam and Bihar, 3 seats each in Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, and 1 seat each in Manipur, Tripura and Jammu and Kashmir will go to polls.

In total 1,206 candidates will contest 89 seats in 13 states on Friday.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is seeking a second-straight term from Wayanad in Kerala. He is pitted against CPI's Annie Raja and BJP's K Surendran.

BJP's Hema Malini, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat are seeking a hat-trick of wins from their respective constituencies.
Congress’ Shashi Tharoor, Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar and actor-turned-politician Arun Govil, Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar's brother DK Suresh (Congress), and former Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy (JDS) are among the other key candidates.

In 2019, the NDA won 56 of the 89 seats that are going to vote on Friday. The UPA had won 24 seats. Six of these seats have been re-drawn as part of the delimitation exercise.

The first of the seven-phase elections held last Friday for 102 seats across 21 states and Union territories saw a voter turnout of around 65.5 per cent.

After Friday's phase, polling will be over in Kerala, Rajasthan and Tripura. In the first phase on April 19, polling was completed in all seats of Tamil Nadu (39), Uttarakhand (5), Arunachal Pradesh (2), Meghalaya (2), Andaman and Nicobar Islands (1), Mizoram (1), Nagaland (1), Puducherry (1), Sikkim (1) and Lakshadweep (1).

In Kerala, 2,77,49,159 people are eligible to cast their votes and out of them more than 5 lakh are first-time voters.

Shashi Tharoor is aiming to win the Thiruvananthapuram seat for the fourth time. He will be in a triangular contest against minister of state Rajeev Chandrasekhar from the BJP and CPI's Pannyan Raveendran.

Hema Malini, who has represented the Mathura constituency since 2014, is contesting against Congress's Mukesh Dhangar, while Om Birla, a two-time MP from Kota is facing Prahlad Gunjal of the Congress.

Tejasvi Surya, the sitting MP from Bengaluru South and the national president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), will face Congress's Sowmya Reddy.
Former chief minister of Chhattisgarh and Congress leader Bhupesh Baghel is contesting from Rajnandgaon, a stronghold of the BJP for over 30 years.

Arun Govil, famous for portraying Lord Ram's character in the Ramayan TV series, is making his electoral debut against BSP's Devvrat Kumar Tyagi and SP's Sunita Verma.

The contest for the Alappuzha seat in Kerala has turned into a prestige battle for the Congress with All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary K C Venugopal's return to the Lok Sabha poll fray after 2014 as the party looks to wrest the only seat it lost to the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) in its landslide 19-1 victory in Kerala in the 2019 polls.

Venugopal has not lost any major election in his career. He won the Alappuzha Assembly seat thrice in a row in 1996, 2001, and 2006 and was elected to the Lok Sabha from Alappuzha in 2009 and 2014.

In 2019, he did not contest after the party elevated him to the post of the AICC general secretary.