Kerala: Palakkad records 70.01 pc voter turnout
With polling officially ending at 6 pm, certain booths in Palakkad witnessed queues of voters still waiting to cast their votes.
Around 74 per cent of voting was recorded in the Amarwara Assembly by-poll in the Chhindwara district of Madhya Pradesh till 5:30 pm on Wednesday.
While there are nine candidates in the fray, the main contest is between Congress candidate Dheeran Shah Invati and BJP’s Kamlesh Shah, who had won on a Congress ticket in the 2023 Assembly polls. He later joined the BJP necessitating the by-poll.
Shah, a three-time Congress MLA and close confidante of former Congress CM Kamal Nath had quit the grand old party on 29 March, ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. Since he also resigned as MLA the by-poll was necessitated.
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In the 2023 assembly polls at Amarwara, Shah defeated the BJP’s Monika Manmohan Shah Batti by a margin of 25,086 votes.
After 1972, the BJP won the Amarwara seat only twice, in 1990 and 2008. The Congress won the seat nine times while the tribal outfit Gondwana Ganatantra Party (GGP) won it in 2003.
The votes will be counted on 13 July.
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