NEW DELHI, March 10, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – India announced Sunday a general
election to be held over nearly six weeks starting on April 11, when hundreds
of millions 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 Gandhi-Nehru 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 final results announced on May 23, it said.
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 deadliest attack on Indian forces in a 30-year-old insurgency in the
part of Kashmir that New Delhi controls was claimed by a militant group based
in Pakistan, one of many that India and others have long accused Islamabad of
harbouring.
– Continued to talk tough –
Twelve days later the Indian air force bombed what New Delhi said was a
training camp of the group deep inside Pakistan, the first time since 1971
that India hit territory beyond Kashmir.
Doubts have been raised about what the raid achieved, and when Pakistan
carried out its own air raid a dogfight ensued and an Indian aircraft was
shot down and its pilot captured by Pakistan.
But Modi has shrugged this off and has continued to talk tough, accusing
the opposition of being weak.
“We won’t spare anybody who is looking to destroy our country even if their
(terrorists’) chiefs are sitting on the other side of the border,” Modi told
a recent rally.
“But the oppositions have a problem with such stern actions too. But I am
going ahead with my resolve to root out terrorism,” he said in his home state
of Gujurat.
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.
Gandhi, long criticised as a lacklustre leader, has also started looking
more recently like a serious challenger.
Congress, which has ruled India for much of its time since independence
from Britain in 1947, won three key state election victories in December,
chipping into Modi’s core support base in the Hindi “Cow Belt” regions home
to nearly half a billion voters.
He has also gone on the offensive over Modi’s economic record, with the
Congress state wins attributed to the prime minister’s perceived failure to
help impoverished farmers and to create enough jobs.