2,500 Narendras, 3,600 Arvinds to vote tomorrow

, May 11: As Varanasi goes to polls on Monday, there will be close to 2,500 Narendras and 3,600 Arvinds exercising their voting rights, but they will be still outnumbered in a big way by voters sharing their first names with candidates of parties like Congress, BSP, CPM and SP.

BJP has fielded its Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi from Varanasi Lok Sabha seat, where others in the fray include AAP's Arvind Kejriwal, Congress' Ajay Rai, Samajwadi Party's Kailash Nath Chaurasia, BSP's Vijay Prakash Jaiswal and CPM's Hiralal Yadav.

Also in the contest are Trinamool Congress' Indira Tiwari and candidates from 16 other smaller parties along with 20 independents -- taking the total number of candidates to a record 42 in this constituency which has close to 16 lakh voters.

An analysis of the Varanasi Lok Sabha voter list shows that there are thousands of voters who share their first names with the major candidates trying their luck in these elections.

Even among the candidates, there are three Narendras -- BJP's Narendra Modi, Janshakti Ekta Party's Narendra Nath Dubey Adig and independent Narendra Bahadur Singh.

Among the voters, there are close to 2,500 persons with Narendra as their first names, while over 3,600 have Arvind in their name.

However, there are no voters with Narendra Modi or Arvind Kejriwal as their names. Neither the BJP's Prime Minister candidate nor the AAP national convenor are voters here. In case of Congress candidate Ajay Rai, at least 15 voters are his namesake, while those with 'Ajay' as their first names are close to 16,000.

There are also three voters named 'Kailash Nath Chaurasiya', while number of those sharing SP candidate's first name stands at more than 6,600.

More than 6,000 of these share both the first and middle name of the SP leader. Beating them all, there are close to 17,000 voters with Vijay as their first name, the same as the BSP candidate for this Lok Sabha election.

In case of CPM candidate Hiralal Yadav, at least 30 voters share full name with him, while the number of voters with 'Hira' as their first name stands at abut 14,000 in Varanasi.

Nearly 200 voters also share the first name of Trinamool candidate Indira Tiwari -- the only woman candidate here. There is also a transgender Basheer Kinnar in the fray.

PTI