NEW DELHI – India is set to announce Sunday the dates for a nationalelection that will see hundreds of millions of voters cast their ballots inthe biggest democratic exercise on Earth.
The Election Commission has called a press conference for later Sundaywhere the timeline for India’s mammoth multi-week polls will be unveiled, asenior government official told AFP.
More than 800 million voters from the Himalayan peaks to the deserts andtropical shores are eligible to vote for a new government for the next fiveyears in an enormous democratic undertaking that will span several weeks.
They will elect 543 lawmakers to India’s lower house of parliament, theLok Sabha, which governs the nation from the capital New Delhi.
The election will see Prime Minister Narendra Modi run for a second termagainst Rahul Gandhi, the latest scion of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty to seekleadership of the world’s second-most populous nation.
They are the two strongest challengers from a field of hundreds ofpolitical parties from across the culturally and geographically diversecountry of 1.25 billion.
Modi, whose right-wing party won an outright majority in the 2014elections, enters the race in a strong position and his Bharatiya JanataParty (BJP) hopes to decimate Gandhi’s left-leaning Congress party onceagain.
The prime minister has also sought to contrast his humble origins as a teaseller against Gandhi, the 48-year-old privileged half-Italian princelingof India’s most famous family.
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But opinion polls have suggested ebbing support for the BJP, and even thatit 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 lookingmore recently like a serious challenger.
Congress, which has ruled India for much of its time since independencefrom Britain in 1947, won three key state election victories in December,chipping into Modi’s core support base in the Hindi “Cow Belt” regions hometo nearly half a billion voters.
He has also gone on the offensive over Modi’s economic record, with theCongress state wins attributed to the prime minister’s perceived failure tohelp impoverished farmers and to create enough jobs.
In the 2014 elections, 830 million people were eligible to vote but only550 million cast their ballots. – APP/AFP
