rediff.com: 60 per cent vote in largely peaceful Orissa poll


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February 22, 2000

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60 per cent vote in largely peaceful Orissa poll

M I Khan in Bhubaneswar

Belying fears, the second phase of the assembly election in Orissa passed off largely peacefully, with about 60 per cent of the voters exercising their franchise.

Till the end of polling at 1700 IST, except for a few cases of ballot snatching and a clash between supporters of the ruling Congress and the opposition Biju Janata Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance, no violence was reported.

Unconfirmed reports said suspected Naxalites snatched ballot boxes in Ramgiri assembly constituency in Gajapati district of south Orissa, on the Andhra Pradesh border.

But a state election commission official in Bhubaneswar said they had not received any report till 1700 hours of any such incident. But he confirmed that some people at Krushna Prasadpur booth in Barchana assembly constituency snatched some ballot papers. Besides, a few clashes were reported from Athagarh, Berhampur and Patkura constituencies.

In the first half of the day, about 35 per cent of the voters exercised their franchise, with no untoward incidents taking place anywhere. In some constituencies, the voting percentage was low in the first five hours, but "everything went smoothly", Chief Electoral Officer A S Sarangi said.

Interestingly, the voters of cyclone-affected coastal Orissa, who had threatened to boycott the poll, voted in large numbers. "We have not received any reports of a poll boycott anywhere," the state election official said.

Unprecedented security was in place for today's polling. As many as 77 of the state's 147 constituencies in 12 districts went to the polls today to decide the fate of 484 candidates, including 32 women.

About 35,000 security personnel, including 55 companies of central paramilitary forces, were deployed to oversee the polling. Sources in the state home department said 90 platoons of the Orissa Special Armed Police were deployed to guard 16,091 booths, 7,618 of them classified as 'sensitive'.

An additional 22 platoons of central paramilitary and OSAP personnel were deployed in Gajpati district in view of the poll boycott call given by Naxalites belonging to the People's War Group. Parlekhemundi and Ramgiri constituencies in the district were among the 19 constituencies declared sensitive. Some of the others identified as sensitive were Pipli, Jatni, Bhadrak, Sukinda, Kendrapara, Dhamnagar, Hinjali, Patkura and Brahmagiri.

Special security arrangements were also made in Mayurbhanj district, the district in which Australian missionary Graham Stewart Staines and his two young sons were brutally done to death last year, in view of the arrest of prime suspect Dara Singh. The border between Mayurbhanj and Bihar was sealed.

Security was also tight in politically sensitive coastal Orissa with 1,134 mobile patrols keeping watch on the situation.

Prominent among those whose electoral fates were sealed today were BJD president and Union Minister for Mines and Minerals Naveen Patnaik, Pradesh Congress Committee president and former chief minister Janki Ballab Patnaik, state BJP president Manmohan Samal and a dozen ministers and several senior BJP and BJD politicians.

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