Congress faces BJP as votes open for 15th Lok Sabha

Millions of Indians are due to vote in the first round of the country's 15th general elections today.
Voters in 124 constituencies will be taking part in Thursday's vote. There are four other phases between then and the last phase on 13 May.
More than 700 million Indians overall are eligible to vote for seats in the lower house of parliament.
The incumbent Congress-led coalition government is facing a challenge from the main opposition BJP-led alliance.
It is also competing against a third front of communist and regional parties in a poll that is too close to call.
Results are due on 16 May and a new parliament must be in place by 2 June.
Voting takes place today in constituencies spread across the country, including volatile areas in north and central India.
States where voting takes place are Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Kerala, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Lakshwadeep and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
More than two million security personnel are expected to be deployed, especially after a string of recent attacks by Maoist rebels who have threatened to disrupt the vote.
Thousands of police and paramilitary troops have been deployed across the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, which will vote for both national and state assembly representatives.
Neither main party is expected to gain a clear majority
"We have taken every necessary measure to ensure peaceful, free and fair elections. Now you go out and vote," state director general of police AK Mohanty said in the state capital, Hyderabad.
Thousands of troops have also been placed on alert in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which has the most seats in the national parliament. Polling takes place for 16 of the state's 80 seats on Thursday.
Security concerns are also likely to be high in the eastern state of Bihar, where heavily armed Maoist rebels on Wednesday attacked a paramilitary camp set up for the elections, wounding one soldier, senior police official Vikas Vaibhav told the Associated Press news agency.
The district where the attack took place is 140km (87 miles) south-west of the state capital, Patna. It too goes to the polls Thursday.
Neither of the two main parties in the election - Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - is expected to gain a clear majority.
Both may have to depend on the support of smaller parties to form a government - and correspondents say the campaign rhetoric in recent days has become increasingly bitter.
While security and the economy are key election issues, especially after last year's attacks in Mumbai (Bombay), global economic meltdown and local and regional issues are all expected to be key issues.
Hours before the first round of battle, as the word war between the Congress and the BJP continued without any loss of acerbity, uncertainty grew among political leaders about the outcome of the 15th Lok Sabha elections. Many appear to be working on compromise formulas based on post-poll alliances even before the first vote has been cast.
The Congress had won 148 seats in the last general election and then added to its numbers by winning byelections. But this time party managers are reluctant to predict the number of seats the party will win. "We will get a substantial number of seats and emerge the largest single party," they feel. Congress leaders were of the opinion that the Left combination, which had won 59 seats, might not be able to play king-maker as it could lose heavily in the red bastions. "The Left parties might not be in a position to dictate the prime ministerial candidate since they also would not be in a position to support a BJP-led front," a Congress functionary said.
Both the Congress and BJP are working out the arithmetic of the regional players' inability to form a government without their support. The calculations of the Congress and the BJP indicate that the regional players would have to support either of them, failing which they would be unable to stay united in the power game, a Congress functionary observed.
According to Congress managers, no party (BSP, SP and BJP) would be able to get more than 30 seats in UP. They expect to get over 25 seats of the total 45 from Punjab (13 seats), Haryana (10), Delhi (7), Jammu and Kashmir (6), Uttarakhand (5) and Himachal Pradesh (4).
Meanwhile the titans, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and NDA PM candidate LK Advani, who had been locked in an acrimonious word war, finally came face to face on Tuesday. They shared the dais at a function in Parliament to commemorate the birth anniversary of B.R. Ambedkar. The cold vibes between the two heavyweights leading their parties to the polls were apparent, the warmth was missing. They shook hands briefly and then the Prime Minister went about his business greeting others and later paying floral tribute before a portrait of Ambedkar. Advani, too, kept himself busy with other leaders.
The NDA prime ministerial candidate, who has been describing Dr Singh as a "weak Prime Minister", later refused to attend a farewell dinner being hosted by Prime Minister Singh for outgoing Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee on Tuesday evening. The Prime Minister had taken a dig at Advani on Monday, saying the BJP's "iron man was quick to melt in the heat of the Kandahar hijacking incident". Later, speaking at another function at Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Prime Minister said, "I do not want to get into personalised politics."
If that was a fight between the big two, accusations and counter accusations flew from other leaders too. RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, TRS supremo Chandrashekhar Rao and other leaders, like the BJP's Murli Manohar Joshi, NTR's daughter D. Purandeswari and former Union minister B. Dattatreya were all pointing fingers at each other.
The results tomorrow will show to some extent how the public took all this.
(BBC Online, PTI, The Asian Age)