Jagdalpur: Over 1.29 million voters of Chhattisgarh's Bastar Lok Sabha constituency, one of India's worst insurgency-hit regions, are set to exercise their franchise Thursday in the shadow of terror and guerrillas' poll boycott.
Eight candidates are in the fray in the constituency where roughly 80 percent of the total 1,797 polling booths have been declared "ultra sensitive".
The main contest is between the BJP nominee and sitting MP Dinesh Kashyap and Congress candidate Deepak Karma, son of late Mahendra Karma, the founder of a controversial civil militia movement - Salwa Judum.
The presence of Aam Aadmi Party candidate Soni Sori, a tribal woman from the district now on bail granted by the Supreme Court as she was facing charges of acting as a conduit for Maoists, has added a third dimension to the battle for Bastar.
Sources at police headquarters in Raipur say that besides Sori, none of the other seven candidates have dared to campaign in the interiors of Bastar because Maoists command most of the area.
