Round 4 today

Several biggies are in the fray on Thursday—among them Pranab Mukherjee, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad, Farooq Abdullah, Kalyan Singh, Sachin Pilot and Shatrughan Sinha. In all, the fate of 85 Lok Sabha seats will be determined by an electorate of 9.5 crore, making this the smallest round in this five-round election. That doesn’t mean its political significance is any less. Thursday’s poll will be critical for Trinamul Congress’s Mamata Banerjee’s political fortunes, put to test the BJP-Ajit Singh alliance in western UP and also be a moment of reckoning for the Mulayam Singh Yadav-Kalyan Singh pact. The big chunk of seats is in Bengal (17), UP (18) and Rajasthan (all 25 seats in the state) where the BJP and Congress are locked in fierce head-to-head fights and are striving for the upper hand. The Congress is hoping to win at least 15 seats in Rajasthan, where it had won just four last time, and make good some of its losses in the south. The BJP is resigned to losing seats but is determined to contain the damage. Rajasthan has changed hands frequently. But few would have thought that the Red bastion of Bengal would join the club of “swing states’’. The CPM is widely tipped to suffer losses comparable to 1984 when the Congress, riding the Indira Gandhi assassination sympathy wave, wrested 14 seats from the Marxists. In Uttar Pradesh, the stronghold of the Mulayam Singh-Kalyan Singh combine, which has created a Yadav-Lodh alliance, will be going to polls from the Etawah region going up west to Bulandshahr. So, it will be make or break for the SP leader—if Mulayam Singh trips up here, it will be difficult for him to wrest even 20 seats. The Congress does not have too many expectations from this round of polling in UP, although the BJP does as it hopes its alliance with Ajit Singh’s RJD clicks and it picks up a few seats in south-western UP—actually the BJP’s hopes of overtaking the Congress at the Centre are critically dependent on how it does in this region. Ajit Singh’s fortunes hang in the balance too, with his son Jayant contesting from Mathura while Anuradha Chaudhary is standing from Muzaffarnagar. The BJP would hope to win seats like Kairana and Ghaziabad where party chief Rajnath Singh is contesting. In Haryana, the momentum is with the Congress but it is still in defensive mode. Last time it won nine of the 10 seats in the state. So, all efforts are to contain losses.