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India campaign fighting injures 15

Election officials check electronic voting machines on Tuesday in Kohima, the capital city of India's northeastern state of Nagaland. Heavy security has been arranged for parliamentary elections which will be held today in the state. PHOTO: AP

Members of India's two largest parties fought with swords, knives and wooden batons yesterday, leaving at least 15 campaign workers injured a day before Indians in seven states go the polls in parliamentary elections.

The fighting between Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the main opposition Congress Party occurred in two villages in Madhya Pradesh, one of the states voting today for 83 of the 543 seats.

India's five-phase elections are to conclude May 10; ballot-counting is set to begin three days later.

Vajpayee's coalition went into the elections bolstered by a booming economy and the prime minister's popular peace overtures with Pakistan. An opinion poll Tuesday showed his coalition surging ahead of its rivals but falling short of a majority in Parliament.

The fighting in Chindwara, 700km south of New Delhi, left 13 Congress workers and two BJP workers hospitalized with serious injuries, Press Trust of India said.

The cause of the clash was not known, but election violence is common in India. Thirty-six people have died in the voting this year, compared with 100 in the 1999 national elections.

The latest opinion polls show the ruling coalition recouping some losses from earlier rounds and inching closer to a majority in the world's largest democratic exercise. The BJP is expected to pick up seats in three northern states, results that soothed financial markets, which fear a hung Parliament.

"The question is not whether we are going to get a majority but how much that majority will be," BJP president Venkaiah Naidu told reporters yesterday, dismissing the poll results. Vajpayee called elections six months early to cash in on his personal popularity and a bumper harvest.

Instead, his party's "India Shining" campaign has failed to resonate among the millions of impoverished rural residents left out of India's economic boom.

The poll results shattered the BJP's confidence about certain victory, forcing it to change campaign strategies in populous heartland states and abandon its "feel-good" campaign rhetoric.

It has fielded top party officials to campaign in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous and politically most important state, and attacked the Congress party's image and ability to govern to try to woo back voters.

Indian shares rose more than one percent in morning trade, helped in part by the latest polls and stronger Asian markets.

"The markets have been over-reacting to these exit polls and opinion polls," said Ketan Jhaveri, director at D.H. Securities. "There was a rebound late in Monday's session, and with the Asian markets also recovering, the market will be steady today."

Exit and opinion polls have a mixed record in India, a country of more than one billion people. They failed to predict the BJP's victory in three key state elections last December.

"The bottom line is that the BJP is still the number one vote-getter in some of these states voting tomorrow," New Delhi-based political analyst Mahesh Rangarajan told Reuters.

"It looks like they have contained their losses in Uttar Pradesh," he said. That state, with 80 seats, accounts for the highest number of lawmakers in parliament.
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