Chhattisgarh Assembly Elections 2023: The Election Commission’s mammoth exercise to conduct assembly polls in 5 states begins with Mizoram and Chhattisgarh Phase-1 on Tuesday, November 7. One of the most challenging areas to conduct polling among all the five states in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar division. The Naxal-hit region is one of the most sensitive in the country. The region’s 12 assembly seats are among the 20 Chhattisgarh constituencies that will go to polls in the first phase tomorrow.
Chhattisgarh Assembly Elections 2023: Security measures for Bastar division
Bastar has over 600 polling booths in sensitive areas. To ensure that voting concludes peacefully, a three-layered security cover comprising 60,000 personnel will keep a watchful eye. These will include 40,000 Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) jawans and 20,000 personnel from the state police.
The security cover will also include women commandos, elite anti-Naxal unit CoBRA members, bomb disposal teams and dog squad. As part of the security apparatus, Naxal activities will be monitored via drones and helicopters. The interstate border will be monitored by special forces from adjoining states like Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha. Helicopters will also be used to transport polling personnel and EVMs for over 156 stations in the interior areas.
The region has two different time slots in which constituencies will vote. The voting time will be from 7 am to 3 pm for Antagarh, Bhanupratappur, Kanker, Keshkal, Kondagaon, Narayanpur, Dantewada, Bijapur and Konta. In Bastar, Jagdalpur and Chitrakoot constituencies, voting will remain open from 8 am to 5 pm.
Authorities have shifted 149 polling stations in five assembly constituencies to the nearest police station and security camps due to security reasons. The number of such polling stations shifted was 196 in 2018 assembly elections and 330 booths in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Why such intense security cover in Bastar?
The CPI (Maoist) party, which has been outlawed, has resorted to violence to try and disrupt the polling. Naxalites have called upon people in the Bastar region to boycott the elections. The CPI (Maoist) killed a BJP leader in a village in the Narayanpur district on Saturday when he was campaigning for the upcoming polls. A Naxal attack in Dantewada district before the assembly polls in 2018 had resulted in the deaths of three policemen and a Doordarshan cameraman.
(Inputs from PTI)
