India has kicked off a six-week election that is expected to give Prime Minister Narendra Modi another five-year term.
Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is seeking a third consecutive victory and a majority that would tighten its grip on India’s politics, economy and society. His party currently holds just over half the seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s bicameral parliament.
The election, which begins at 7am on Friday, will be the world’s largest, with 968 million voters going to the polls in seven phases across different regions until 1 June. Results will be announced on 4 June.
The ruling party, backed by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance coalition, campaigned under the slogan “Modi’s Guarantees”, highlighting welfare programmes that it said had benefited hundreds of millions of Indians. He also repeated the slogan “Viksit Bharat” (Developed India), referring to his promise to transform the world’s most populous country into a developed nation by 2047.
During the campaign, Modi also touted his success in raising India’s profile on the global stage, building roads, airports and other infrastructure, and presiding over the inauguration of a vast Hindu temple complex in Ayodhya in January, replacing a demolished mosque.
Challenging Modi’s camp are the opposition Indian National Congress and some two dozen left-of-centre opposition parties, which have struggled with the BJP’s funding and dominance of the media and law enforcement agencies.
The opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.) has accused the Modi government of using divisive anti-Muslim rhetoric to consolidate the Hindu-majority vote and of trying to rig the election by arresting dissidents. Two regional leaders from opposition parties, Arvind Kejriwal, chief minister of Delhi, and Hemant Soren, chief minister of the eastern state of Jharkhand, have been jailed in corruption cases this year.
Modi has denied allegations that his government has misused law enforcement and tax agencies to target opponents.
Congress candidate Rahul Gandhi, India’s most prominent opposition figure, has also criticised Modi’s links to billionaires Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani and attacked India’s ‘electoral bonds’ political fundraising scheme, of which the BJP was the biggest beneficiary before it was recently scrapped by the Supreme Court.
Modi also attacked Gandhi, whose father, grandmother and great-grandfather were prime ministers, and the regional parties that hold power in southern and eastern India, accusing them of “dynastic politics”.
Pre-election polls point to a third victory for Modi, who has set an ambitious target of 400 seats – 370 for the BJP, which won 303 seats in 2019, and 30 for its NDA allies.
A pre-election survey by Delhi-based pollsters CSDS-Lokniti gave Modi’s BJP-led NDA a 12 per cent lead over the rival I.N.D.I.A. alliance.
Although India’s economy is one of the fastest growing in the world, unemployment remains high and the opposition is particularly vulnerable. The CSDS-Lokniti survey also highlights that unemployment and prices are two critical concerns for almost half of the electorate.
