Today in Politics: INDIA bloc to hold informal meet, Punjab votes in final phase

All attention is now on the results day on June 4.

With the voting process for the seventh and last phase underway on Saturday, the INDIA bloc will hold an “informal meeting” to discuss the preparations for the counting day on June 4 and how its leaders and workers need to stay alert.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge made the statement at a press conference held in the AICC headquarters in New Delhi on Thursday.

“This is an informal meeting. In this, we will only discuss what kind of preparation we should have on the day of counting and how our people should be alert, whether it is about EVMs or the 17C form is used… Just for our own sake, we are holding this meeting to train our people and to give them information,” he said.

Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee is likely to skip the meeting as she “is busy with the polls”, Kharge said.

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Now, onto exit polls: A look back at how close they were in 2009, 2014, 2019 

What is at stake in the final phase

On Saturday, 57 seats across eight states and Union Territories go to polls.

Polling will be held at one go in all 13 seats in Punjab and all four seats in Himachal Pradesh. The other states that will vote are Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal — where polling was held across all seven phases — and Jharkhand and Odisha, where Assembly polls are also being held simultaneously.

In 2019, the parties constituting the Opposition INDIA bloc and the ruling BJP-led NDA won 19 and 30 of these 57 seats, respectively. The BJP alone won 25 of these constituencies. Among the INDIA bloc members, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Congress won the most seats at nine and eight, respectively. Several unaligned parties also bagged several constituencies: the Biju