Polls open in India's general elections in the most massive democratic process in history

Six weeks in a row of voting for an electorate that doubles the total population of the EU

April 19 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The polling stations in India opened this Friday at 7:00 a.m. (local time), beginning the general elections in which 970 million people are registered to vote and whose authorities anticipate as the largest participation ever seen in a democratic process.

The elections to the 543 seats of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, will last 44 days, until June 1, and the result that will be announced three days later will decide the country's new prime minister, with the current president, the ultranationalist Narendra Modi, as the leading favorite to renew the position for the second time against a fragmented opposition.

As a note: 25 percent of the seats are reserved for the Dalit caste and the indigenous tribes or Adivasis of India, two of the most disadvantaged social sectors. It is also worth remembering that, although the Indian Parliament recently approved a new measure to reserve a third of legislative seats for women, the implementation of this law has been delayed until after 2024.

The process is divided into seven voting phases spread over six weeks. The second phase will take place on April 26; the third on May 7; the fourth on the 13th of that month, and the fifth and sixth will be celebrated on May 20 and 26. The seventh and final will take place on June 1, three days before the results are published, on June 4, as explained by the head of the commission, Rajeev Kumar.

It is the most numerous process and also the most expensive. Parties (more than 670) and candidates (more than 8,000) spent around 8.5 billion dollars (about 7.9 billion euros) in 2019 on their electoral campaign, a figure that this year's vote will almost certainly exceed, according to estimates the Carnegie Endowment for Peace think tank.

Throughout the vote, citizens will be able to cast their ballot in one of the million voting booths distributed throughout the country — a minimum of one every two kilometers, the Electoral Commission intends — under the gaze of more than 15 million of volunteers to answer any questions that may arise, even if they have to travel to Tashigang, at 4,600 meters above sea level, where the highest voting booth on the planet was located in 2019.

Another curiosity: the sole inhabitant of the remote Gir National Park in Gujarat, home to the last Asiatic lions in the wild, has its own polling station with its own electronic voting machine, because there are no paper ballots for voting in person.

The distribution in phases is also due to an essential safety issue. Simultaneous elections would be impossible for Indian security forces to monitor, especially in areas characterized by high levels of political violence, especially during elections, such as the state of West Bengal.

Another state on the margins is that of Jammu and Kashmir, traditionally marginalized by the Indian federal government, which has seen its expectations of holding its long-awaited elections to the local Parliament postponed due to the impossibility of holding them simultaneously with the general ones. This past weekend, Modi and Kumar promised the state's residents that the long-awaited elections would take place “soon,” as soon as “security forces are available.”