Tamil Nadu : Forty-one percent polling till 1 pm in RK Nagar bypolls
Chennai, Dec 21 (IBNS) : About 41 percent of the voters exercised their franchise till 1 pm on Thursday in the RK Nagar bypoll which is underway in Chennai, reports said.
The seat fell vacant following the death of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in December, 2016.
The main contestants include AIADMK candidate E Madhusudhanan and rebel party leader TTV Dinakaran- both taking Jayalalithaa's name. While Chief Minister E Palaniswamy and deputy CM O Panneerselvam are banking on Madhusudanan, Dinakaran, contesting as an independent, is also confident of his victory.
DMK's N Marudhu Ganesh and Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) K Nagarajan are other notable contestants.
The result of the high-stakes bypoll will be known on December 24.
The bypoll has been fraught with more controversies as a Dinakaran loyalist released a video on the eve of the election purportedly showing Jayalalithaa in a hospital few days before her death.
Anticipating trouble, 2,000 police personnel and 15 companies of the CRPF have been deployed. The Election Commission had sent nine observers, considered to be the highest for a single Assembly constituency.
The bypoll was first scheduled to be held in April this year, but was cancelled due to complaints of large-scale voter bribery
The Election Commission in early part of the year had postponed the poll. .
The EC took the call to scrap the scheduled poll two days after the I-T Department raided the house of Tamil Nadu Health Minister Vijayabaskar.
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