India / Assembly election schedule to be announced by ECI at 3.30pm today

New Delhi: The election Commission of India (ECI) will announce the schedule for assembly elections in Goa, Punjab, Manipur, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh today, news agency ANI reported.

The announcement is expected to be made at a press conference at 3.30pm, ANI further said.

Assembly elections in five states - Goa, Manipur, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand - are expected to be held in the next few months. While the term of the current Uttar Pradesh assembly is ending in May, those of the other four assemblies are ending on different dates in March.

Two more states - Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat - will witness polling towards the end of the year.

These election are touted to be crucial, not only for the ruling dispensation - Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh, Goa, Manipur and Uttarakhand, and Congress in Punjab - but also for the challengers, like the Samajwadi Party (SP) in UP and Trinamool Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Goa.

The BJP is campaigning aggressively to dethrone the Congress in Punjab, where a protest against farm laws metamorphosed into nationwide agitation and forced the Centre to announce a rollback. Fast-paced developments in the northern state in the past few months has turned the electoral battle into an interesting one.

Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state and arguably most crucial politically. With a population over 200 million cutting across caste and communities, and 80 Lok Sabha seats and 403 assembly seats, the state wields disproportionate power in the country’s politics. Having roots in the state propels a political party or leader to the national arena because no other state comes close in terms of political heft.

In Goa, the fight is as much between the BJP and the Congress as it is between the AAP and the Trinamool Congress to emerge as the new Opposition alternative; in Uttarakhand, the incumbent BJP appears to be in trouble after changing two chief ministers in a year, and in Manipur, the Congress will seek to wrest power from the BJP in a state where it emerged as the single-largest party only to see its lawmakers defect.