Candidates to file papers from today

Gurgaon: The nomination process for the May 12 Lok Sabha elections in Gurgaon parliamentary constituency will begin on Tuesday.
District election officer and Gurgaon deputy commissioner Amit Khatri said the last date for filing nominations will be April 23. Nomination papers will be scrutinised on April 24 and candidates can withdraw their names by April 26, he said.

Captain Ajay Yadav from Congress is likely to file his nomination papers on Thursday, and might be the first among major candidates to do so, sources said. BJP candidate Rao Inderjit Singh is expected to file his nomination on Friday after a rally at Gaushala Maidan. INLD and the AAP-JJP alliance has not announced their candidates from Gurgaon yet.

Khatri said all necessary arrangements for the polls have been made. “Only four people will be allowed to accompany a candidate inside the office of the returning officer for filing nominations,” said Khatri, adding that candidates can file their papers between 11am and 3pm during the nomination period.

According to Election Commission guidelines, two expenditure observers and one general and police observer each will oversee the election process in Gurgaon constituency. Expenditure observer Neeraj Kumar and Vinod Kumar will arrive in Gurgaon on Tuesday, while general observer Manmeet Nanda is lated to reach Gurgaon on April 22.

“Any individual can file a complaint about violation of the model code of conduct through mobile app C-Vigil. Till now we have received as many as 100 complaints related to such violations on the app, and all the complaints have been resolved in a time-bound manner. We try to resolve complaints within 100 minutes (1.6 hours). Voters can call the voter helpline — 1950 — for any query related to the electoral roll, polling booth and other details,” said Khatri.

The district election officer added that the number of polling booths has increased from 1,113 in 2014 to 1,194 this time. There were around 20.4 lakh voters in Gurgaon last year. After January 31, the names of around 60,000 new voters have been added to the electoral roll, bringing up the total to around 21 lakh.

The constituency had 18.43 lakh voters in 2014.

In the last Lok Sabha polls, BJP’s Rao Inderjit Singh had wont the Gurgaon seat with a total of 6.44 lakh vote. Runner-up Zakir Hussain from the INLD got 3.7 lakh votes. BJP was first to announced the name of candidate from Gurgaon for the upcoming polls, and the party has already started campaigning. Inderjit has already opened his election office in every assembly constituency and conducted meetings with ‘panna pramukhs’ (party members in charge of each page of the voter list). On Sunday, Inderjit Singh held a meeting with representatives of several RWAs from across the city.

Congress candidate Ajay Yadav is likely to kickstart his campaign from Thursday by filing his nomination papers after a rally, while AAP-JJP and INLD are still in the process of deciding candidates.