Maharashtra, Jharkahand assembly polls likely in Nov

Election Commission will announce assembly polls in Maharashtra only after the J&K and Haryana election results on Oct 4, and is likely to tie them up with the Jharkhand polls.
Sources said that elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand may be held in Nov and would be completed well before the term of current Maharashtra assembly expires on Nov 26.
Chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar, while announcing the poll schedule for J&K and Haryana, said assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana - which were held together over the last few cycles - were delinked this time as the existing Haryana assembly’s term was ending much earlier on Nov 3, 2024. Since J&K was a new addition to the list of assembly polls due in this part of the year, the options available to the EC were to either sync Haryana polls with J&K’s or wait until the conclusion of J&K polls to announce elections in Haryana.
However, as J&K polls had to be completed within the Sept 30 timeframe set by the Supreme Court and the earliest the poll process could start was Aug 20 (since Amarnath Yatra would be over a day before and the final revised rolls for the UT published by then), the EC did not have a decent window to hold the Haryana polls after the J&K polls.
Also, the poll panel did not deem it proper to announce the Haryana polls separately while the poll process in J&K was still on.
“The time between the completion of J&K poll process on Oct 6 and Nov 3, by when a new Haryana assembly should be in place, was not enough to accommodate the entire poll process, including the nomination procedure, campaign and polling. Besides in 2019, the Maharashtra assembly’s term was only till Nov 9, unlike Nov 26 now, and much closer to the expiry date of the Haryana assembly on Nov 2, 2019, which is why the two states had gone to polls together,” said an EC official.
With the Jharkhand assembly’s term ending on Jan 5, 2025, EC sources indicated it made sense in terms of logistics and expenditure to bring the Jharkhand polls forward and align them with the exercise in Maharashtra. “Since the Delhi assembly polls are due only in Feb next year, EC appears more inclined to bring Jharkhand polls forward,” the official said.