BJP gaining ground as polling advances
Quarter of India's 815 million voters voted on Thursday, the biggest day of its staggered election, with the ruling Congress party battling to stem a further slide in the polls against the opposition Hindu nationalists after another week of damaging headlines.
The country is now over halfway through its nine days of voting for a new parliament in the world's biggest ever election.
Narendra Modi, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) candidate for prime minister, has been wooing voters with promises to rouse India's economy from its slowest growth in a decade and create jobs for its booming young population.
A decision by the Election Commission to reprimand a senior Modi aide, Amit Shah, for making speeches deemed to stir tensions with minority Muslims underlined critics' assertions that the party is a divisive force.
However, the EC yesterday lifted the ban on Shah. Speaking earlier this month in Uttar Pradesh, Shah was recorded telling voters to reject parties with Muslim candidates. He also said Muslims in the area had raped, killed and humiliated Hindus.
But in the latest large opinion poll, taken in the first week of April, the BJP and its allies were forecast to win a narrow majority in the 543-seat lower house of parliament, compared with previous surveys predicting that they would fall short.
"Modi could be the change we need," said software engineer Murali Mohan, after casting his vote in a suburb of Bangalore, the centre of India's outsourcing sector and the capital of Karnataka.
"I want to see constructive work, economic development in this country," said Mohan, 39.
Voting took place in 121 constituencies across 12 states on Thursday.
The next round of voting is on April 24. Voters of 117 constituencies in Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Puducherry will vote that day.
Voting runs until May 12 and results are due on May 16.
Despite his pro-development image, Modi is arguably the most divisive figure in Indian politics today.
Launching another scathing attack on the BJP, Congress president Sonia Gandhi yesterday said that the saffron party's acts were threatening the democratic fabric of the country, PTI reported.
Addressing a rally at Bhatgaon town in Sarguja Lok Sabha constituency, she said: “The BJP is crossing all the limits to capture power in this election. Their behaviour is extremely dangerous for the democratic set-up in our country. Elections will come and go, but the way they are doing things and lying to the people of this country, will hamper democracy.”
Without naming Narendra Modi, Sonia cautioned the people that no democracy could be safe in the hands of one man.
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 he had no case to answer.
"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 village in Maharashtra who voted for the Nationalist Congress Party, a Congress ally.
Congress, led by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, is forecast to suffer its worst-ever defeat after a decade in power due to the economic slowdown, high inflation and repeated graft scandals. The party has ruled India for more than 50 of its 67 years of independence.
A former media adviser and a former coal secretary have both released books in recent days 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 PV 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."
Indian elections are notoriously hard to forecast due to the diverse electorate and a 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.
Voter turnout has averaged 68 percent so far, the Election Commission said on Wednesday, versus 58 percent across the whole election in 2009.
"It is because of the people's unrest against the establishment," Nitin Gadkari, a BJP leader and the party's former president, told Reuters.
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