India’s month-long election has ended, with tens of millions of Indians casting ballots in a vote widely expected to usher in a shaky coalition government. While results are not being announced until tomorrow, Indian media polls indicate the Congress party-led ruling coalition could be narrowly ahead of the opposition Hindu-nationalist alliance.
But with the existing alliances deeply fragile, and both main parties set to launch their final quests for allies once the results are officially announced, little in the political scene is clear.
“We can only be certain about the uncertainty of it,” said Amitabh Mattoo, a political analyst. “You will naturally have a coalition.”
PHOTO: REUTERS
But the final form of that coalition was impossible to predict.
The Constitution states that a new parliament has to be in place by June 2.
Wednesday’s polling was the fifth and final phase of the elections in the nation of nearly 1.2 billion people, where voting is staggered for logistical and security reasons. The month-long election has seen sporadic violence, especially in the Himalayan state of Jammu-Kashmir, where separatists called for a boycott of the polls.
The scale of the election is staggering, with 714 million voters eligible to cast their ballots at more than 828,000 polling stations scattered from the slopes of the Himalayas to the tropical southern coast.
But there was little to link those voters together. There were no resonant, central issues in the campaign, much of which was dominated by vague promises of prosperity. With neither of the two main parties expected to win an outright majority, many seats will go to a range of regional and caste-based parties. Their campaigns revolve around a vast range of issues — from farmers’ demands for cheap electricity to offers of free TVs for the poor.
Overall turnout was approximately 59 percent to 60 percent, the national election commission announced on Wednesday, up slightly from 58 percent in the last national vote in 2004.
Media reports said the coalition led by the Congress, the left-of-center party that for years held an iron grip on Indian politics and which has long been dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, held a slim lead over the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies.
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