APR 17 -
India kicked off the biggest day of its mammoth general election on
Thursday, with a quarter of its 815 million voters set to head to the
polls during a week of fresh blows for the ruling Congress party and
gains for the Hindu nationalist opposition.
Narendra Modi, the prime-ministerial candidate of the opposition
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been wooing voters with promises to
rescue India from its slowest economic growth in a decade and create
jobs for its booming young population.
In the latest large opinion poll, the BJP and its allies were forecast
to win a narrow majority in the 543-seat lower house of parliament,
compared to previous surveys predicting that they would fall short.
Voting on Thursday is taking place in 120 constituencies across 12
states, from the fractious Himalayan region of Jammu and Kashmir - where
election materials had to be airlifted to some remote polling stations -
to the lush southern state of Karnataka whose capital is the IT and
outsourcing hub Bangalore.
The world's biggest ever election is taking place in nine stages from April 7 to May 12, with results due on May 16.
"We want Modi to win this time. That's why we are here early in the
morning, doing our best for him," said Preetham Prabhu, a 32-year-old
software engineer who was the first to cast his vote in a polling
station that opened at 7 a.m. in a residential suburb of eastern
Bangalore.
The Congress party, led by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, is forecast to
suffer its worst-ever defeat after a decade in power due to public anger
over the economic slowdown, high inflation and a string of graft
scandals. The party has ruled India for more than 50 of its 67 years of
independence.
Congress has struggled in recent days with a former media adviser and a
former coal secretary both releasing books that paint Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh as a well-intentioned but weak figure who answers only to
party president Sonia Gandhi.
"It's only a dynasty, like previously we had kings ruling," said P.V.
Padmanabhan, a 79-year-old retired electricity board official who has
voted in every Indian election, and was lining up to vote at the eastern
Bangalore polling station.
"They have to give it to somebody else. (Leaders) should not only come from Nehru's family."
Yet Modi's image remains tarnished by Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat,
the western state where he is chief minister, on his watch 12 years ago.
More than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in the
violence.
Modi denies accusations that he failed to stop the riots and a Supreme
Court inquiry found no evidence to prosecute him. In an interview with
ANI television news on Wednesday, Modi accused journalists of seeking to
smear him over the riots.
Amit Shah, who runs the BJP's campaign in Uttar Pradesh, India's most
populous state and a key political battleground, has been censured by
the election authorities after giving a series of speeches deemed to
have stoked tensions with Muslims.
"People have forgotten what Modi did to people of this country. I think
saving people's lives is more important than development," said Shafina
Khan, a 21-year-old Muslim teacher in Kamshet, a village surrounded by
sugarcane fields in the large western state of Maharashtra.
Khan had just cast a vote for the Nationalist Congress Party, a
Congress ally, in a polling station set up in a government school.
TECH BILLIONAIRES AND ANIMAL ACTIVISTS
Indian elections are notoriously hard to forecast due to the country's
diverse electorate and parliamentary system in which local candidates
hold great sway. Opinion polls wrongly predicted a victory for a BJP-led
alliance in elections in 2004 and underestimated Congress's winning
margin in 2009.
Thursday's parliamentary candidates range from IT billionaire and
Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, running for Congress in Bangalore,
to Maneka Gandhi, an estranged member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty
standing for the BJP in Uttar Pradesh.
Voter turnout has been 68 percent on average in the 111 constituencies
that have voted so far, versus 60 percent in the same constituencies and
58 percent nationally in 2009, according to data released by India's
election commission on Wednesday.
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