The country is all set for the second round of elections on April 18 in the ongoing seven-phase Lok Sabha polls that will elect 543 members to the lower house of Parliament.
Going to polls in the second phase will be 95 seats in 12 states and one Union Territory.
Here is a look at some of the big names contesting in phase two of Lok Sabha elections.
Late Dravida Munnetra Kazagham leader M Karunanidhi’s daughter and DMK President MK Stalin’s half-sister Kanimozhi is taking on BJP state chief Sundararajan from Thoothukkudi in Tamil Nadu. In 2014, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's Jeyasingh Thiyagaraj Natterjee won the seat with a margin of 3,66,052 votes over DMK’s P Jegan. Photograph: @KanimozhiDMK/Twitter
Former finance minister P Chidambaram's son Karti Chidambaram is one of the 26 candidates contesting the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Sivaganga constituency in Tamil Nadu. Karti's main competition is with BJP national secretary H Raja and TTV Dinakaran-led AMMK candidate V Pandi, who is gaining a lot of attention than the formers. Sivaganga used to be an undisputed bastion of the Congress and Karti's father P Chidambaram but they lost the public mandate in the 2014 general elections.Karti has a Herculean task at hand to get Congress back to winning ways in the constituency. Photograph: @KartiPC/Twitter
Actress-turned-politician Hema Malini, the sitting MP, faces a tough challenge from Narendra Singh of the Rashtriya Lok Dal and local industrialist Mahesh Pathak of the Congress. Bollywood's 'Dream Girl' is hoping that she can keep her political dreams alive and win again from the Mathura constituency, despite the anger among voters over issues including unemployment and Yamuna pollution. Photograph: @dreamgirlhema/Twitter
Uttar Pradesh Congress president Raj Babbar will await his fate as he contests from Fatehpur Sikri, which will see a triangular battle between Babbar, BJP's Rajkumar Chahar and BSP's Shreebhagwan Sharma, who is a two-time MLA from Debai assembly constituency of Bulandshahr. Babbar had unsuccessfully contested from Fatehpur Sikri in 2009. While campaigning, the actor has been projecting his image as "Aapka Apna Raj Babbar" saying, "This is the land where I was born, which made me the Raj Babbar who earned name in Mumbai. This is the land that elected me to Lok Sabha also. Photograph: @RajBabbarMP/Twitter
National Conference president Farooq Abdullah is seen as the frontrunner to enter the Lok Sabha for the fourth time from Srinagar seat. Besides Abdullah, the other prominent candidates are Aga Mohsin of PDP, Imran Ansari of People's Conference and Khalid Jehangir of BJP. The NC president had lost the 2014 Lok Sabha polls -- his only electoral loss in his political career -- to then PDP leader Tariq Hameed Karra by a margin of over 42,000 votes. However, Karra resigned from the PDP as well as the Lok Sabha in 2016. Abdullah won the by-elections for Srinagar seat held in April 2017 which had the dubious distinction of recording the all-time low of 7.2 per cent voter turn out, while violence on the polling day that left nine persons dead and scores of others injured. Photograph: Omar Abdullah/Twitter
Union minister Jitendra Singh is among the 1,600-odd contestants in the second phase of Lok Sabha polls to be held on Thursday. The Union minister is contesting the Udhampur seat -- one that he won in 2014 by defeating his nearest rival Ghulam Nabi Azad of the Congress. Singh secured 487,369 votes while Azad managed to bag 426,393 votes. Photograph: @DrJitendraSingh/Twitter
Janata Dal-Secular patriarch H D Deve Gowda is contesting for the first time from Karnataka's Tumkur. Gowda vacated the Hassan Lok Sabha seat from where he had been contesting to his other grandson Prajwal Revanna. Photograph: PTI Photo
Considered to be a prestigious constituency because it is a hub of the information technology industry, Bengaluru South elected BJP leader Anant Kumar or six consecutive terms. He died a few months ago. Surya, 28, is new to electoral politics and is facing senior Congress leader and Rajya Sabha member B K Hari Prasad. Photograph: PTI Photo
