Lok Sabha Election 2019: Stage set for Phase 5, all eyes on Uttar Pradesh's big hitters

A total of 51 seats across seven states will go to polls on Monday in the fifth phase of polling, and the fate of several senior leaders across party lines will be in the balance. The highest number of seats are from Uttar Pradesh, which sees polling for 14 seats, including key battlegrounds of Lucknow, Amethi, Raebareli, etc. In addition, there are also 12 seats from Rajasthan, seven each from West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, five from Bihar, four from Jharkhand and two from Jammu and Kashmir.

All eyes, however, will be on Uttar Pradesh's Raebareli and Amethi seats, where the mother-son duo of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi will fight to retain the Congress's pocket boroughs. Of the 14 seats going to polls on Monday, the BJP had won 12 in 2014, with only Raebareli and Amethi voting Congress. Amethi will especially be a high-voltage fight, with BJP fielding Union minister Smriti Irani. The SP-BSP 'grand alliance' has also not put up candidates from the two seats, but will contest the other 12. Of them, SP will fight seven and BSP from five.

The other key contest will be from Lucknow, where Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh is seeking re-election. Former Chambal brigand Malkhan Singh has been fielded by the newly floated Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party-Lohia, led by Mulayam Singh Yadav's brother Shivpal, from the Dhaurahra constituency, and he will take on former Union minister and Congress candidate Jitin Prasad.

The battle is no less intriguing in other states either. Rajasthan's Jaipur Rural will see a fight between two Olympian athletes; BJP's Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore is taking on Congress's Krishna Poonia. While Rathore had won by a huge margin of 3.32 lakh votes in 2014, Poonia is banking on the caste equation being in his favour. Jaipur Rural is a Jat dominated constituency, the community Poonia belongs to.

In Bengal, which had seen violent clashes during polling in the previous phases, the Election Commission will deploy 578 companies of central forces, covering all polling booths. Almost all seven seats will see four-pronged contests, with TMC, Congress, CPM and BJP all fielding candidates. Besides general election observers and expenditure observers, the poll panel has also for the first time deployed a special police observer and a special observer. In another first, VVPATs will be used in all polling booths along with EVMs, EC sources said.

Another first will be recorded in Kashmir's Anantnag constituency, which will see a third phase of polling. It's for the first time that a single constituency is seeing multi-phase polling, which was necessitated this year because of the prevailing security situation. Apart from Anantnag, Ladakh will also have polling on Monday. PDP president Mehbooba Mufti is pitted against state Congress president GA Mir from Anantnag.

In all, there are 674 candidates in the fray across 51 seats, and 8.75 crore voters will decide their fate. Once the fifth phase concludes, elections would have taken place for a total of 424 seats. The sixth and seventh phases will have polling for 59 seats each, and will take place on May 12 and May 19 respectively. All results will be declared on May 23.