The gigantic election machinery in India, the most populous country on the planet, started this Friday with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party of the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, as the favorite. Almost 970 million people are called to the polls throughout seven phases deployed over the next 44 days. We will have to wait until June 4 to know the results. The electoral climate is divisive after 10 years – two terms – of Modi in power. Its formation has based a good part of the campaign on highlighting the growing international and geopolitical weight of the country, the development of infrastructure, aid programs for disadvantaged classes and the promotion of the Hindu religion, with recent examples such as the opening in January of a temple to this belief on the disputed site of a centuries-old mosque.
Meanwhile, international organizations have increasingly criticized the democratic regression that the country is suffering and the discrimination against minorities, especially Muslims. The opposition denounces remote-directed political persecution by state institutions; protests how serious issues like inflation, unemployment and the plight of farmers have been tiptoed around the media, while cameras follow Modi everywhere; and warns that secularism, enshrined in the constitution, could be compromised if he wins the BJP again with a discourse inflamed with religion.
In this first stage, 102 seats are elected in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, which will be in charge of investing the Government. It is the largest of all the phases, with 166 million voters summoned, and it takes place simultaneously in constituencies spread across 21 states. In the next six, voting will be carried out progressively throughout the territory until the 543 parliamentary seats in dispute are completed. Modi, 73, has set the threshold of reaching 370 seats – 67 more than those obtained in 2019 – and aims to reach 400 together with the coalition she commands, the National Democratic Alliance.
“I make a special appeal to young people and those who vote for the first time to vote in large numbers,” Modi posted on the social network X shortly after the polls opened. “Every vote counts and every voice matters.” Youth is an electoral treasure to be pampered in a subcontinent in which nearly 65% of the population is under 35 years of age. If Modi wins, he would be the second Indian prime minister elected three times in a row, after the country's post-independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru... the great-grandfather of current opposition leader Rahul Gandhi.
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“Go out and strengthen democracy by applying the balm of your vote on the wounds inflicted on the soul of the country in the last 10 years,” Gandhi, 53, the best-known face of the Congress Party and the latest exponent, also claimed in X. from a key lineage in Indian politics, son, grandson and great-grandson of prime ministers. His party, which obtained only 50 deputies in 2019, leads a block of groups that try to cast a common shadow on the flashes of the BJP under the acronym INDIA.
“I voted with my entire family and there are long lines waiting to cast their vote,” says Ruby Khan in a message, who participated this Friday morning in Jaipur, one of the constituencies in the state of Rajasthan. Khan, vice president of the Minorities department in the Congress Party, warned last week in a telephone interview that India is heading towards a new type of “dictatorship” and that the rights of minorities are being “crushed.” She fears that the BJP, if it gains a sufficient majority, will try to erase the word “secular” from the country's Constitution. “People are literally blindfolded by a single concept: Hindutva,” she says, referring to the right-wing political ideology that seeks to make India an openly Hindu nation-state.
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