- Voting will take place today in eight seats each in Bihar and Bengal, seven in Delhi, 10 in Haryana, four in Jharkhand, 14 in Uttar Pradesh, and the final seat in Jammu & Kashmir — Anantnag-Rajouri, where poling was moved from the third to the sixth phase.
- Odisha will pick representatives for 42 assembly constituencies and six Lok Sabha seats.
- By the end of today, election will be completed in 486 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats. Polling will also be completed in Haryana, Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir.
- The most riveting contest will be for national capital Delhi, where the BJP swept all seven seats in 2019. This time, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party is out to prise a few with its “Jail Ka Jawab Vote Se” campaign. AAP is contesting four seats in the national capital, its ally Congress three.
- The phase will be crucial for NDA, which has to keep its score intact to meet its “400-plus” target. In 2019, the BJP alone won 40 of the 58 constituencies going to polls today in the Hindi heartland and the east. Its NDA allies won five more seats.
- The parties of the Opposition INDIA bloc — Trinamool Congress, National Conference and Samajwadi Party – had won five seats, the Congress none.
- Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party — which contested the election in alliance with Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party in 2019 and is now unaligned — and Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal also won a few.
- The key candidates for this phase are the BJP’s Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan from Sambalpur, Manohar Lal Khattar from Karnal, Sambit Patra from Puri, Maneka Gandhi from Sultanpur, late Union minister Sushma Swaraj’s daughter Bansuri Swaraj from the New Delhi constituency, Manoj Tiwari from North East Delhi and industrialist Naveen Jindal from Kurukshetra.
- On the Opposition bloc are former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Mehbooba Mufti from Anantnag, actor-turned politician Raj Babbar from Gurgaon, Deepender Singh Hooda from Rohtak, JNU students’ union’s former president Kanhaiya Kumar from North East Delhi.
- The counting of votes will be held on June 4 after the last phase of the election ends on June 1.
