A turnout of just over 55% in Round 5 of the UP elections on Sunday maintained the trend of declining voter presence compared to 2017, when the same 61 assembly seats straddling 12 districts of Purvanchal and parts of Bundelkhand had clocked 58.4%. Barabanki spared the poll belt the blushes with 66.9% while Chitrakoot, once the dacoit-infested badlands of Bundelkhand, reported a voting figure of 61.3%.
Hindutva nerve centre Ayodhya was the other outlier among the 12 districts with 61%. Sangam City, in comparison, reflected voter inertia with 53.7%, marginally lower than the 2017 figure of 54%. Of the other districts, Shrawasti recorded 57%, Sultanpur 56%, Pratapgarh 52%, Rae Bareli 56%, Kaushambi 59%, Amethi 55%, Bahraich 56% and Gonda 56%.
Barring an alleged attack on the convoy of Pratapgarh’s Samajwadi Party candidate Gulshan Yadav in Kunda, there were no law-and-order blemishes anywhere, officials said.
The 693 candidates in the fray in this round of polls included deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya, cabinet minister Siddarth Nath Singh and sixtime MLA Raghuraj Pratap Singh, alias Raja Bhaiya
60% turnout in4th phase
Four out of nine districts in UP’s Avadh, Terai and Bundelkhand regions on Wednesday reported a higher voter turnout than in 2017, including a decade high of 61% in Lucknow, but the overall figure of just over 60% in the 59 seats that went to polls in Round 4 fell short of the 62% clocked five years ago.
Besides Lucknow, the districts that outperformed were Pilibhit, Rai Bareli and Fatehpur. Pilibhit’s voter presence was the highest at 67% while Lakhimpur Kheri, where four farmers were among eight people killed in violence during a farm protest last October, recorded 65%. Other districts in focus such as Unnao had a below par turnout of 55%. Hardoi, where PM Narendra Modi campaigned for BJP, reported 57%. Fatehpur's 57.9%, though lower than the average for the fourth phase, exceeded its 2017 showing.
