Polling for the Ludhiana West Assembly bypoll in Punjab began Thursday morning here amid tight security arrangements. The polling began at 7 am and it will continue till 6 pm, said officials. The counting of votes will be held on June 23.
The Ludhiana West Assembly seat fell vacant following the death of AAP MLA Gurpreet Bassi Gogi in January. The Ludhiana West segment is set to witness a multi-cornered contest with major political outfits — the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Congress, BJP and Shiromani Akali Dal vying to outdo each other in the urban constituency.
Campaigning for the bypoll ended on Tuesday evening. There are a total of 14 candidates in the fray and 1,75,469 voters are eligible to exercise their franchise – 85,371 of them women and 10 belonging to the third gender. A total of 194 polling stations are there for the bypoll with 100 per cent live webcasting of polling stations, officials said.
The voting process will be monitored in real-time from the integrated command and control centre located at the district administrative complex. As many as 235 CCTV cameras have been installed at polling stations, said officials. The ruling AAP has fielded Rajya Sabha member Sanjeev Arora for the bypoll. Arora (61) is a Ludhiana-based industrialist and is also known for his social welfare work.
The Congress has placed its bet on former minister and Punjab Congress working president Bharat Bhushan Ashu (51). Ashu had been MLA twice from this seat in 2012 and 2017. He was defeated by Gogi by a margin of 7,512 votes in the 2022 Assembly polls.
The BJP has field party`s senior leader Jiwan Gupta. He is a member of the core committee of Punjab BJP. He had earlier remained the party`s state general secretary. SAD named Parupkar Singh Ghuman as its candidate for the bypoll. Ghuman is a lawyer and the former president of Ludhiana Bar Association.
This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever