India goes to the polls

Indians have begun voting in a general election that “will last six weeks and zigzag across the country”, say Tripti Lahiri and Vibhuti Agarwal in The Wall Street Journal. Polls suggest the result will be a third national victory for prime minister Narendra Modi (pictured) and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Voters approve of Modi’s nationalism and the fact that “their country is finally being taken seriously on the world stage”, despite “an undercurrent of economic anxiety” over unemployment and inflation.

The contest isn’t exactly taking place on a level playing field though, says The Economist. Modi has “curbed the independence of the media, the courts and civil society”, and tax and investigative agencies have targeted dozens of the opposition’s politicians, arrested two of its party leaders and frozen bank accounts. The main opposition leader was suspended from parliament for four months in 2023 for mocking Modi’s name. Indeed, the contest is so “uneven” that some have discussed boycotting it. Still, it’s hard to dispute that Modi is popular, and the opposition has “struggled to identify a coherent message to compete with the BJP’s combination of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) and development”.

That message may have cemented the BJP’s grip on the northern and western states, but it holds less appeal in other parts of India, says Philip Sherwell in The Sunday Times. The south, the “engine room of India’s current economic boom”, is much less impressed, and its secular tech-based development “offers a model of a very different India” to Modi’s – just why he made a breakthrough there a priority in his campaign.