India’s general elections, the biggest democratic exercise in the world, get underway in April and will decide the leadership and direction of the country of 1.3 billion people for the next five years.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party came to power with a historic landslide victory in the last
national polls, in 2014.
More than 900 million Indians will be eligible to cast
ballots. That includes 45 million people who turned 18 and became eligible to
vote since 2014. The Lok Sabha has 543 elected seats, and the party or coalition
that holds a 272-seat majority selects the prime minister.
India’s laws mandate that no voter should have to travel
more than 1.25 miles to cast his or her ballot. With India’s vast geography,
this means that this year there will be 1.04 million polling stations with more
than 2 million electronic voting machines.
About 11 million election workers will carry out the
exercise, some traveling to remote snow-capped mountains, thick forests and
isolated islands to administer voting. A lone voter in the Gir National Park in
the western state of Gujarat, famous for Asiatic lions, gets his own polling
station equipped with an electronic voting machine.
Federal security forces watch over polling stations, a
mammoth undertaking that requires voting to be spread across a five-week
period. Voting will take place on seven different days between April 11 and May
19, with dozens of constituencies casting ballots each day.
Votes are counted May 23 and the results announced the same
day.
Social media is expected to play a huge role in the campaign
in India, where about 430 million people own smartphones and 200 million use
WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging platform. One social media expert
estimates that there are 87,000 WhatsApp groups aiming to influence voters.
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