INDIA IS to hold general elections in five phases in April and May in which more than 714 million people are eligible to vote.
The independent election commission said voting would take place between April 16th and May 13th and results for the 545-member parliament would be declared on May 16th. The new administration would be sworn in immediately thereafter, replacing prime minister Manmohan Singh’s Congress Party-led federal coalition, which completes its five-year term in May.
Chief election commissioner N Gopalaswami said staggered voting was to allow security forces to deploy around the country to prevent unscrupulous candidates coercing an electorate that is more than twice the population of the United States. The month-long process would involve some four million election workers, half of them security personnel manning 828,804 polling centres that will house 1.1 million electronic voting machines.
A polling centre for a solitary voter is planned for western Gujarat state’s Gir lion sanctuary, while scores of others will be located in remote Himalayan villages reachable after days of trekking, and desert regions accessible only by camels.
The electoral line-up is between the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and the main opposition bloc, headed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that was ousted from office in 2004. Both parties are lobbying hard to stitch up alliances in order to seize an early advantage.
The Congress Party, led by the powerful Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, has said it would nominate Manmohan Singh as its prime minister, while LK Advani, former deputy prime minister, is the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance’s candidate.
Also in the electoral fray are a loose coalition of smaller parties known as the Third Front that comprise the Communists and a clutch of smaller regional groupings, opposed to both the Congress and the BJP.
While security and the financial crisis remain key electoral issues, analysts say the vote will be dominated by a myriad of caste and regional alliances and local developmental issues. Political parties say terrorist strikes and serial bombings in the recent past will figure prominently.
Rivalling the elections as a weapon of “mass distraction”, however, will be the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament, a truncated version of the traditional game which will run between April 10th and May 24th.
“Throughout the election campaign the mind space of nearly every Indian with access to a TV set and some evening leisure time will be dominated by the intricacies of cricket,” says columnist Swapan Dasgupta, who warned of voter apathy towards venal, inefficient and self-absorbed politicians.