Chandigarh, May 25 (IANS ) Haryana on Saturday registered an approximate turnout of 8.31 per cent in the first two hours of polling.
As per the Election Office, the Bhiwani-Mahendragarh seat saw the state’s highest turnout of 10.26 per cent, whereas Faridabad recorded the lowest turnout at 5.46 per cent, followed by 6.20 per cent in Gurugram and 6.92 per cent in Ambala.
A total of 2,00,76,786 voters, comprising 94 lakh women, will decide the fate of 223 candidates, after weeks of heated campaign barbs.
“There has been no report of any delay in starting the poll process,” an electoral officer told here.
The main contest is between the Congress and the state-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The polling will see some high-profile contestants in key battles. Among them are two-time Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, who is contesting his first Lok Sabha election from Karnal, Congress leader Deepender Hooda from Rohtak, and Union Ministers Rao Inderjit Singh and Krishan Pal Gurjar.
Congress has pitted actor Raj Babbar against Rao Inderjit Singh from Gurugram.
Besides the Lok Sabha polls, there is a bypoll for the Karnal Assembly seat, the seat vacated by Khattar, where Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, the outgoing Lok Sabha MP from Kurukshetra, is among the nine candidates in the fray. Saini had replaced Khattar as the Chief Minister in March.
Chief Minister Saini and his predecessor Khattar were among the early voters who cast their votes at their respective polling stations.
While Saini cast his vote in his hometown Naraingarh in Ambala district along with his wife after paying obeisance at a Sikh shrine, Khattar exercised his franchise in Karnal city.
BJP leader and richest Indian woman with $33 billion net worth, Savitri Jindal, whose youngest son Naveen Jindal is also in the fray, cast her vote in her hometown Hisar.
After casting the vote, Savitri told the media that the country has developed at a fast pace under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
Seemingly confident about the BJP’s prospects in the general elections, she added, “Prime Minister Modi will be elected for a third consecutive term.”
Savitri’s youngest son Naveen Jindal (54) is the BJP’s candidate from Kurukshetra, the seat he represented between 2004 and 2014. Savitri and her son switched from the Congress to the BJP in March, ending their nearly two-decade association with the Congress.
Jindal is taking on AAP candidate and former Rajya Sabha MP Sushil Gupta. The AAP is contesting the Lok Sabha elections in Haryana in an alliance with Congress and has been given Kurukshetra.