Punjab: Arrangements in place for May 26 local body polls

Necessary arrangements are in place for the elections to the 103 municipal bodies, including eight municipal corporations, in Punjab on Tuesday, officials said here.

Counting of votes will take place on May 29, they said.

Polling will take place in 1,896 wards of the municipal bodies through ballot papers. It will start at 8 am and continue till 5 pm.

Elections will take place in eight municipal corporations -- Mohali, Bathinda, Abohar, Barnala, Kapurthala, Moga, Batala, and Pathankot. Besides, polling will also be held for 75 municipal councils and 20 Nagar Panchayats, officials said.

A total of 7,555 candidates are in the fray for the May 26 local body elections in the state.

Ruling party AAP has fielded maximum number of candidates at 1,801, followed by 1,550 candidates of the Congress, 1,316 nominees of the BJP, 1,251 candidates of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and 96 nominees of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

Besides, there are 1,528 Independent candidates for the local body elections.

There are 35,45,567 registered voters for these municipal bodies, which include 17,11,635 women.

According to officials, 740 polling booths have been declared sensitive and 275 hyper-sensitive.

Around 35,000 election personnel and 32,000 police personnel have been deputed on election duty.

Officials said elaborate arrangements have been made to ensure smooth, peaceful and transparent polling. Adequate security personnel have also been deployed at polling stations and sensitive locations to maintain law and order during the electoral process.

The Punjab government has declared a holiday in the state on May 26 to facilitate voters to cast their votes. This holiday will also apply to all Punjab government offices, boards, corporations, and educational institutions situated in Chandigarh.

The state government on Monday announced an exemption for all workers and employees working in establishments, including factories, to allow them to cast their vote. It has granted an exemption to workers in registered shops and commercial establishments to allow them to exercise their right to vote, the officials said.

The local body elections are being seen as crucial for all major political parties -- AAP, BJP, Congress and SAD -- as these are taking place ahead of the 2027 Punjab assembly polls.

All these major parties are fighting on their parties' symbols.

In the poll campaign which ended on Sunday, many senior leaders including Punjab ministers Aman Arora, Lal Chand Kataruchak, Punjab Congress chief Amrinder Singh Raja Warring, Punjab working president Ashwani Sharma, Union Minister Ravneet Singh Bittu, AAP MP Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer, Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal aggressively canvassed for their parties' nominees.

Opposition parties at the time of filing nomination papers had accused the AAP government of misusing the government machinery by rejecting nomination papers of many rival candidates.

Punjab BJP president Sunil Jakhar on Sunday had warned the AAP government against using any illegal means to win the local body elections, saying the state would no longer bow to AAP's ''fear and pressure tactics''.

The opposition parties also took an exception to the State Election Commission's decision of holding the polling through use of the ballot papers instead of electronic voting machines.

The matter had even reached the Punjab and Haryana High Court where petitioners challenged the SEC's decision of using ballot papers for polling.

However, the high court declined to interfere in petitions and observed that it was now too late in the day for it to pass any order.

The Supreme Court on Monday junked a plea challenging the SEC's Punjab State Election Commission's decision of holding the polls through ballot papers.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M Pancholi questioned the petitioner Ruchita Garg for approaching the court late, and said it cannot destabilise the election process now.

''Elections are tomorrow, what can be done now? There is no time left,'' the bench said.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)