NEW DELHI: India, the world’s largest democracy with 714 million voters, will pick a new government over five phases between April 16 and May 13, and the result will be declared on May 16, the Election Commission announced yesterday.
Chief Election Commissioner N. Gopalaswami told reporters voting would be held in five phases.
“The process of finalizing the election schedule takes into account the school examinations... the local holidays... festivals, the harvest season and so on,” he said. Goapalaswami, set to retire on April 20, hit out at the use of money power by politicians.
“We have taken serious note of illegal use of money power. The polling officers have been told to strictly monitor the expenditure (by candidates),” he said.
The parliamentary elections will cost a whopping Rs. 100 billion, said a study by Center for Media Studies.
The staggered voting is to allow security forces to move around the country to curb any attempt to coerce an electorate more than twice the population of the United States.
The monthlong vote would see about four million election workers — about half of them security personnel — manning more than 800,000 polling stations.
Around 1.1 million electronic voting machines will be used across the nation to elect 543 members of Parliament.
Gopalaswami said voting would be held in five phases in the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh which sends the single biggest number of lawmakers to Parliament.
Elections are staggered in four phases in the eastern state of Bihar.
Maharashtra and West Bengal would undergo polling over three phases. Eight states — Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Orissa and Punjab — would witness voting over two phases. Fifteen other states would end the exercise within a day.
Political parties welcomed the announcement of the election, which will take place exactly five years after voters delivered a verdict in April-May 2004 that unseated the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government and brought into power a Congress party-led coalition.
“We have confidence that on May 16 when the counting would be done, the country would get a new government under the leadership of L.K. Advani,” asserted BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad, confident that the vote end five years of Congress-led rule. Congress spokesperson Jayanti Natarajan echoed him: “We welcome it. I am sure the elections will be concluded in a free and fair manner.”
With just a month and a half to go, parties are reaching out to each other for pre-election tie-ups.
The Congress said on Sunday it was allying with the regional Trinamool Congress Party in West Bengal state, a long-standing communist stronghold.
However, the main battle will be between the Congress party-led coalition and the leading opposition bloc, headed by the Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).But neither side is seen as strong enough to win enough seats to govern alone, and the results — expected soon after May 16 — are likely to lead to complex rounds of horse-trading for the support of smaller regional parties.
“No party will have a clear mandate in the upcoming elections,” said political commentator M.J. Akbar, noting the number of coalitions that have governed India since 1996.
The major parties have already begun unofficial campaigns, with Pakistan, terrorism, Hindu nationalism and the economic slowdown among the key issues.
— With input from agencies
