Shimla: On the last day of withdrawal of nominations on Thursday, 45 candidates were left in the fray for the May 19 elections to the four Lok Sabha seats in Himachal Pradesh, official said.
There are 17 candidates for the Mandi parliamentary constituency, six for Shimla, and 11 candidates each for the Kangra and Hamirpur Lok Sabha seats.
Only one candidate, Dula Ram, who filed his papers as an Independent from Shimla, withdrew his nomination. Nine nominations were rejected during scrutiny.
Only one woman — Nisha Katoch — from the state is contesting the general elections even as women account for 49 per cent of the state’s electorate and are more proactive when it comes to voting.
Katoch, 37, is the Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha nominee for the Kangra parliamentary seat. She runs a travel agency in Dharamsala and her husband is a transporter.
The two main parties — the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — have not fielded a single woman candidate in the state this time.
Of the 51.59 lakh voters in Himachal Pradesh, male voters number 26,45,584, while the female voter count is 25,13,357.
[source_without_link]IANS[/source_without_link]