India election: Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party still leads polls as voting reaches penultimate phase
- Employment and rural distress seen as important issues as mammoth six-week election approaches its end
Indians voted on Sunday in the second-to-last round of six-week-long national elections, marked by a highly acrimonious campaign with Prime Minister Narendra Modi flaying opposition Congress party rival Rahul Gandh’s family for the country’s ills.
Voting in 59 constituencies, including seven in the Indian capital, will complete polling for 483 of 543 seats in the lower house of parliament. The voting for the remaining 60 seats will be held on May 19.
Votes will be counted on May 23. India has a total of 900 million voters.
Turnout in the first five phases averaged 67 per cent, nearly the same as the 2014 elections that brought Modi to power.
Opinion polls say his Bharatiya Janata Party is still the front-runner, but it is likely to return with fewer seats. The BJP captured 31 per cent of votes in 2014, but it won more than half the seats to wrest power from the Congress party in a first-past-the-post electoral system in which a candidate who receives the most votes wins.
Modi is running his campaign like a presidential race, a referendum on his five years of rule with claims of helping the poorest with doles, free health care, providing toilets in their homes and helping women get free or cheap cooking gas cylinders.
At the same time, he is banking on stirring Hindu nationalism by accusing the Congress party of being soft on nuclear-rival Pakistan and terrorism, pandering to minority Muslims for votes and pampering Kashmiri separatists.