Indians yesterday flocked to the polls under scorching heat in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi as a marathon national election reached its final day, six weeks after voting first began.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is widely expected to win a third term when results are announced on Tuesday, in large part due to his cultivated image as an aggressive champion of India’s majority faith.
The 73-year-old’s constituency of Varanasi is the spiritual capital of Hinduism, where devotees from around the nation travel to cremate deceased loved ones by the Ganges.
Photo: AFP
It is one of the final cities to vote in India’s grueling election and where support for Modi’s ever-closer alignment of religion and politics burns brightest.
“I voted for growth and development of my country,” local resident Brijesh Taksali said outside a polling station. “There’s only one leader that I know ... Narendra Modi. I voted for him.”
Modi has already led the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to two landslide victories in 2014 and 2019, forged in large part by his appeal to the Hindu faithful over the country’s minority Muslim community.
He has made a number of strident comments about Muslims on the campaign trail, referring to them as “infiltrators.”
He has also accused the motley coalition of more than two dozen opposition parties contesting the poll against him of plotting to redistribute India’s wealth to its Muslim citizens.
Janesar Akhtar, a Muslim clothes maker working in Varanasi’s famed embroidery workshops, said that the BJP’s sectarian campaigning was an unfortunate distraction from India’s chronic unemployment problems.
“Workshops here are closing down and the Modi government has been busy with the politics of temples and mosques,” the 44-year-old said. “He is supposed to give us jobs and not tensions.”
India has voted in seven phases over six weeks to ease the immense logistical burden of staging an election in the world’s most populous country.
Turnout is down several percentage points from the last national election in 2019, with analysts blaming widespread expectations of a Modi victory as well as successive heat waves that have scorched India’s northern states.
Authorities in the eastern state of Bihar on Friday said that 10 poll workers had died of heatstroke the previous day while setting up for the vote.
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