Election fever hits India
Colourful campaigns and rallies as race for votes heats up
INDIA’S general election is nearing its climax after weeks of huge rallies and colourful campaigning.
Thousands of people have hit the streets to cheer on the candidates, with the leading parties having spent an incredible £11.4billion on campaigning.
Excited voters have staged motorcycle parades and created giant flags and banners as the country is gripped by election fever – in stark contrast to anything ever seen in the UK.
And the race for the premiership is reaching boiling point. Voting phase four out of seven ends this week, meaning 70% of all seats in the nation’s Lok Sabha will have been decided by Monday.
Incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi is running for a third consecutive term. Recent opinion polls suggest his Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies will win the election. The main challenge comes from a coalition of political parties headed by the Indian National Congress.
This week, scores of BJP supporters gathered in the city ofVaranasi to see Modi, many wearing the party’s official colour of orange on scarves and clothing.
BJP fans have praised the nation’s economic successes. Political analyst Indrani Bagchi said: “Capitalism is our natural state. For years we were not a capitalist economy and that dragged us down but, since the 1990s, successive leaders have pushed our economy towards the free market.”
In Varanasi, a city of four million people, you can sense this enterprising spirit on every street corner.
Speaking from a family-run photo studio, Anita Aggrawal, 30, a paediatric dietitian, said she was “very happy” with Modi as she believes he has done a huge amount for the local area.
She listed his achievements, such as increasing tourism in the area by restoring it to its former glory, rolling out infrastructure projects and increasing safety for women on the streets.
Anita said she wanted Modi to return as PM because of the many projects he has already committed to concerning development of roads and hospitals.
She also pointed to a restoration of the region’s shared cultural values as another reason for her support.
She said: “We feel very proud that he has helped this region rediscover its religious heritage.”
Law student Ashwini Tiwari, 25, said Modi was “helping to reclaim our civilisation and rediscover our lost heritage”.
Fellow student Divyansh Pandey, 20, said it was “mesmerising” to see Modi, who he described as having a “very honest” character.
However In Delhi, student Monisha Swarkare, 23, and air stewardess Aju Sureswadle, 23, told us they would not be voting for Modi.
Aju said: “Nobody likes Modi. I don’t want him to win because he is a gangster.”
Student Arjun Singh Nain, from Chandigarh, Punjab, said: “Everybody talks about it. It is a conversation around our dinner tables. Modi is there because of a lack of options – he is the best option we currently have. He is there because all the others are thieves. Everyone else is corrupt.
“He is also corrupt. But he is smarter with his corruption.”
And in rural Amritsar, Punjab state, an angry group of communist detractors surrounded by commandos bellowed over a PA system on the sidelines of a BJP rally: “Death to Modi, die BJP!”
IN THIS mega-year for global elections, we are experiencing the coincidence of national ballots running in dozens of different countries – including, but not limited to, America, Iceland, Belgium, Romania and almost certainly the UK.
Yet of nearly two billion eligible electors in 2024, as many as half of them will cast their votes in India’s seven-phase, six-week election, which began on April 19 and continues until June 4.
By any account, this is a staggering figure. In the largest exercise in democracy ever undertaken, India’s next government is currently being chosen by an electorate of nearly 969 million citizens from its 1.4 billion-strong population.
That’s more than the entire electorates of the US, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the UK, Mexico, and South Africa put together.
Thus nearly a billion people – 497 million men and 471 million women, 18 million of whom are first-timers – are casting their votes at 1.05 million centres, to pick 543 MPs.
Three other interesting facts stand out: Firstly, our independent Election Commission is required to make the process truly inclusive – so no voter should be required to travel more than 1.2 miles to a polling booth.
AS A result, officials will trek 23 miles through mountainous jungles in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, to enable one single voter to cast her vote. In other words, India takes the idea of getting every vote, even if it means crossing rivers, mountains or deserts, and braving crocodiles or searing heat to do so. And voters respond with enthusiasm: turnout is usually in excess of 65%, more than in many other democracies.
Secondly, India’s elections are conducted to a very high degree of accuracy and with a great degree of ingenuity. Imagine the complexity of producing balloting material in a polling booth in multiple languages in the world’s second most linguistically diverse country. (780 languages are spoken, second only to Papua New Guinea’s 840)
The solution is a colourful array of party symbols with which nominees canvass for votes.
While the logistics and planning are immense, results are generated super-fast. Counting will begin and largely end by the time we arrive at work in the UK on June 4.
The reason for this speedy counting is simple, for the past 20 years, all our elections have been conducted on Electronic Voting Machines – five million this time round. These cost roughly £330 each, and none is connected to any external source – neither for power nor connectivity. They record the voters’ intentions and generate a verifiable paper printout, stored automatically in a connected metal strongbox.
Thirdly, when they are covered outside India, our elections seem to generate either strong opinions or be damned with faint praise. While it’s true the noise and colour of domestic debate about the direction of our democracy can be overwhelming, it’s almost entirely carried out in-house.
India remains visibly free and democratic. India’s elections are also uniquely contrarian in their nature, at least for those trying to decode them for a nonIndian audience.
Much analysis abroad likes to claim India is an “electoral autocracy”. Whatever that might mean, it tends to resemble the apocryphal story of aeronautical engineers pronouncing that the bumble bee ought not to be able to fly. The bumble bee, unable to read these studies, does what it can: it flies.
SO TOO, Indians and their elections.And this is what should matter to our British friends. After all, in 1947, at our moment of freedom, with 90% of the then 340 million-strong population living below the poverty line, we chose to be a democracy.
No other country in the history of democracy chose to become, or remained one, in such conditions. Most other liberal democracies evolved into their current form, gradually removing restrictions based on gender, wealth and education as the nation prospered.
We did it all at once. Recognising the uniqueness of India’s democracy, and the importance of this periodic exercise by every shareholder, is a modest investment in sustaining the largest instance of the world’s most important guardrail: democracy. And so I hope Express readers will watch this space as your newspaper reports from India on the world’s largest, most colourful and most unique elections.
Because it matters to you too.
‘While the planning is immense, results are generated super-fast’