Hyderabad: Nizamabad Lok Sabha constituency in Telangana has already created a record in the history of Indian elections as the Election Commission for the first time will be using the electronic voting machines (EVMs) for 185 contestants for a seat. Interestingly, 178 of them are farmers registering their protest over agricultural problems.
Now, these 178 contestants are going to select a candidate from one among them for the election on 8 or 9 April, barely a couple of days before the polling on Thursday. For this, all the contestants will sit together at a place in Armoor town in the constituency and declare them through lottery or raising of hands, a sort of election before election.
Their demands include remunerative prices for their produce and Nizamabad district accounts for a large number of turmeric and red jowar cultivation in the entire state.
Apart from the main contenders—sitting MP and CM K. Chandrasekhar Rao’s daughter K. Kavitha (TRS), Madhu Yashki Goud (Congress) and Dharmapuri Aravind (BJP)—and four other candidates of registered political parties, these farmers in the fray have become a challenge to the EC as far as conduct of the polls is concerned.
As per the present arrangements, the EC can only display the names of as many as 63 candidates plus a NOTA button on an EVM. There were instances of even bigger number of candidates—463 in 1996 LS elections from Nalgonda, also from Telangana, but then ballot papers were used so the logistics were not a tough task.
None of the farmers whose papers were found valid refused to take back their nominations. The EC was faced with two options—either to go for ballot paper or go for bigger EVMs by postponing the election. Even as the news spread about the two options, all sorts of conspiracy theories have come up, as this being part of a larger plan to either win or defeat CM’s daughter Kavitha here.
However, after hours of careful examination of the situation, the EC has accepted the challenge and decided to go ahead with the election on the same date and with the same mode—of EVMs. The decision was taken on 2 April. Since thenefforts have begun to rush in 25,000 EVMs as each of the 1,700 polling booths was connected with 12 of them.
With the provision for reserve units, a total 2,300 control units and 2,000 VVPATs, too, were rushed from ECIL and BEL, Bangalore. Chief Electoral Officer for Telangana Rajath Kumar told this newspaper that a herculean task of mobilising as many as 600 engineers, in case of any emergency, were being stationed at Nizamabad in the next one week. “We can imagine the scale of the task going by the number of 200 engineers available for the entire state,” Kumar said.
The 178 farmers have attracted nationwide attention as they have been moving around in the constituency together in a couple of buses. They have raised their deposit amounts through mass donations and now are collecting their election expenditure.
Nizamabad district that Sriram Sagar reservoir across Godavari river is famous for farmers’ militancy right from 1950s. M. Raji Reddy, one of the contestants, told this newspaper, “We are neither supporting TRS nor Congress nor BJP. We only want to highlight our long pending problems. We are fed up with voting for these parties over the years, and they failed to solve our issues.”
People in Padigal, a major village in Armoor Assembly segment in the Lok Sabha seat, have pledged their unanimous support.“TRS leaders are ridiculing us that we all will lose our deposits, but we will show our mettle by winning this seat,” K. Govardhan, a farmers’ activist, said.
The farmers’ candidate are capable of upsetting one of the three main contenders—Kavitha who won this seat in 2014 and Yashki Goud, who won twice in the past and Aravind, son of expelled TRS Rajya Sabha member D. Srinivas.