The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Voting has begun in Jharkhand for the assembly elections today (November 13) and will continue till 5 pm. Bypolls are being held on several assembly constituencies in various states today as well.
In the first phase, voting is being held to elect members of the legislative assembly from 43 constituencies. A total of 683 candidates, 609 men, 73 women and a transperson – labelled the ‘third gender’ by the Election Commission – are in the fray in the 43 seats.
Seventeen of the 43 seats are reserved for general candidates, 20 for Scheduled Tribes and six, for the Scheduled Castes.
At 9 am, voting percentage was at 13%.
In a post on X, chief minister Hemant Soren, who leads the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, said, “If you like our work, please support us. I promise that I will do 10 years of work in the next 5 years so that no one can stop our pace of progress.”
The JMM has sharpened its traditional Jharkhandi versus non-Jharkhandi political line in its campaigns.
The Bharatiya Janata Party has been campaigning against the JMM and the larger INDIA bloc of which it is a part with an aggressive Hindutva agenda and the labelling of the state’s Muslim population as “infiltrators”.
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh has lodged a formal complaint with the Election Commission of India against BJP’s campaign ads, leading to an FIR registered at the cybercrime police station in Ranchi on November 10.
The Wire‘s political editor had noted in an analysis that even a slight swing in such a tightly contested poll can throw up unexpected numbers in the new assembly. At the moment, the 2024 elections could be anybody’s game, and a last-minute push becomes all the more important for both camps.