India to hold mega-election from April 11 - May 19
NEW DELHI: India announced Sunday a general election to be held over nearly six weeks starting on April 11, when hundreds of millions of voters will cast ballots in the world’s biggest democracy.
The poll will see right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi run for a second term against Rahul Gandhi of the GandhiNehru dynasty to lead the world’s second-most populous nation.
Some 900 million voters from the Himalayan peaks to the deserts and tropical shores are eligible to vote for a new government for the next five years in an enormous democratic undertaking.
From April 11 to May 19 voters will elect 543 lawmakers to India’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, which governs the Asian nation of 1.25 billion people from the capital New Delhi, the electoral commission said Sunday.
Counting will be completed and results announced on May 23, it said.
“The festival of democracy. Elections are here. I hope this election witnesses a historic turnout,” Modi posted on Twitter late Sunday.
Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP) and Gandhi’s left-leaning Congress are the two strongest challengers among hundreds of political parties from across the culturally and geographically diverse country.
Modi, whose right-wing party won an outright majority in the 2014 elections, enters the race in a strong position, the 68-year- old remaining a popular figure and the BJP a well- oiled political machine.
In recent weeks he has been able to bolster his nationalist credentials in India’s most serious standoff with Pakistan in years, sparked by a suicide bombing in the disputed Kashmir region on February 14 that killed 40 Indian paramilitaries.
The prime minister has also sought to contrast his humble origins as a tea seller against Gandhi, the 48-year- old privileged half-Italian princeling of India’s most famous family.
But opinion polls have suggested ebbing support for the BJP, and even that it may fall short of the 272 seats it needs to form a government on its own. — AFP