And guess who are among the contestants? Politician Lalu Prasad’s sons.
The intense battle between the NDA and Grand Secular Alliance comes back to Bihar with phase three of voting on 50 Assembly seats tomorrow 28 October 2015.
RJD chief Lalu Prasad’s two sons are contesting in Mahua and Raghopur, which should make for an interesting viewing experience across the country as they tune in for a battle of the ballots.
Also included in this phase of the polls is Lalu Prasad’s political home ground Saran, which has ten Assembly seats and seven seated Nalanda, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s home district.
In phase three of the polls, the 50 seats are spanned across the following districts: Patna, Vaishali, Saran, Nalanda, Buxar and Bhojpur.
According to Additional Chief Electoral Officer R Lakshamanan, the fate of the 808 candidates, 71 of which are women, is in the hands of 1.45 crore eligible electors.
6,747 polling stations have been announced as critical and 1,909 as Left Wing Extremist hit. There are a total of 14,170 polling stations, from which 716 will have live webcasting. All booths will be manned by central forces.
Other than the two sons of Lalu Prasad (Tej Pratap Yadav and Tejaswi Yadav), other distinguished politicians whose fate will be decided in phase three include BJP leader Nand Kishore Yadav (Patna Sahib), minister Shyam Rajak from Phulwari, minsiter Shrawan Kumar from Nalanda, Deputy Speaker Amarendra Pratap Singh (Ara) and BJP’s Arun Kumar Sinha (Kumhrar).
In an effort to ensure peaceful voting, 1,107 companies of Central Para Military Forces will be deployed on the day, along with state police.
Although voting commences at 7am in all 50 constituencies, in ten constituencies it will end at 4pm, and at 5pm for the remaining 40.
Voting during first two phases already took place on 12 October (49 seats) and 16 October (32 seats). Phases four (55 seats) and five (57 seats) will take place on 1 and 5 November respectively.