Counting has begun in India of more than 600 million votes cast in the country’s marathon six-week election, reports The Guardian.
This year’s polls, held over seven phases starting on 11 April, have been described as a contest for the soul of India, with Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government pitted against a disparate group of opposition parties including the Congress, whose secular vision has defined the country for most of the past 72 years.
Results from 542 lower-house constituencies - one fewer than usual, after authorities discovered £1.3m unaccounted cash in a south Indian party leader’s home and cancelled the poll there - started being counted at 8am local time (3.30am GMT), with results to be released progressively throughout the day.
Most exit polls show Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) on track to form government in coalition with smaller parties. Should the BJP cross the 272-seat majority mark on its own, or come close, it would mark a new era of Hindu nationalist hegemony in Indian politics fuelled by Modi’s extraordinary popularity.
“We are in an era where you have, once more, a central gravitational force around which Indian politics revolves,” said Milan Vaishnav, the director of the south Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “I think 2019 will confirm that the BJP has replaced the Congress as that.”
The process of counting such a vast number of votes (one southern electorate, Malkajgiri, has roughly the population of Uruguay) used to take up to 40 hours but has been reduced considerably by the growing use of electronic-voting machines since 1982.
At more than 1m polling booths across India on Thursday, election authorities under the supervision of party delegates will break the seals of the devices and check the total number of votes registered for each candidate. A handful of machines in each constituency will be cross-checked against paper receipts produced for every vote.
The release of exit polls on Sunday evening predicting a Modi landslide led to a chorus of accusations by opposition leaders that the machines had been hacked to favour the BJP. The complaints grew louder during the week with the publication of several pieces of footage showing machines being transported to and from polling booth in the backs of trucks. Election authorities say those machines were spares and that the ones in use were locked in secure rooms.
The decisions of voters in the vast country of 1.3 billion people have been driven by innumerable local concerns, caste and religion, or rumours and opinions traded over WhatsApp or cups of chai at a tea stand. But the figure of Modi has towered over the contest like no prime minister since Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.
“There is no match for Modi among the opposition parties,” said Rahul Verma, a fellow at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research. “He’s running at nearly an all-time high popularity, he’s charismatic, and people still repose faith in him despite not being very happy with the economic side of the government’s performance.”
A survey released this week by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies found that nearly one-third of people who voted for the BJP did so in support of Modi, rather than the party or their local candidate. Modi’s popularity had actually grown compared with 2014, when he led his party to the first majority victory in 30 years, the researchers said.
The months leading to election were bumpy for the BJP. A government survey revealed unemployment to be the highest in 45 years. Data showing that farming incomes had plummeted to their lowest point in 18 years confirmed the distress of agricultural workers, some of who had marched on Delhi carrying skulls that they said belonged to farmers who had committed suicide due to drought and mounting debt.
Modi’s promise on the 2014 campaign trail that “good days are coming” threatened to turn into a millstone around his neck.
Then a bombing in the disputed territory of Kashmir on 14 February helped to transform the contest. Rather than dent Modi’s strongman image, the killing of 40 Indian paramilitaries by a Pakistan-based militant group became the stage for his response, an air strike deeper in neighbouring territory than Indian jets had ever struck.
“It really put a premium on leadership,” said Vaishnav. “It spoke to the attributes that Modi often touts about himself: decisiveness, muscularity, nationalism and to a certain extent people started to see the vote not about a choice between political alternatives but a vote for the nation.”
Modi styled himself as “chowkidar” - Hindi for watchman - and made national security the dominant message of the early part of his campaign. “Clap so hard people will think air strikes have happened,” a BJP official urged the crowd at Modi’s rally in Delhi earlier in May.
The main opposition Congress party, led by Rahul Gandhi, never found its footing again after the Pakistan strikes and has been out-gunned by the BJP’s deep pockets, relentless campaigning and disciplined party machine.
A report by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) found that the BJP took in more than 73% of the donations declared by India’s seven largest political parties in 2017-18. The ruling party spent more than 260m rupees (£2.9m) on advertisements on Facebook, Youtube, Google and Instagram, compared to 35m rupees by Congress.
Many opposition leaders have tried to paper over their differences to form a broad anti-Modi coalition that they say will be enough to oust the leader, who won office with just over 30% of the national vote share five years ago. But their alliance was purely instrumental and had failed to inspire voters, Verma said.
“The opposition has failed to generate any kind of alternative vision for the country,” he said. “They tried to get together in some states and make coalitions but it seems like the perception is that these are opportunistic electoral alliances, they have nothing new to offer and have no leadership to match Modi.”