India is the world’s largest democracy with a population of more than 1.4 billion people. This election, 969 million people are eligible to vote – this number totals over 10 percent of the global population, including 18 million first-time voters.
Elections started on 19 April and polls will stay open for another couple of weeks, closing on 1 June. Results for the world’s largest election in an unprecedented year for elections globally will be announced on 4 June.
The process: seven phases
India prides itself on the scale of its parliamentary elections which are unmatched globally and this year’s election is unprecedented in the country’s own history.
Due to India’s geographic size, voting has been split into seven phases across the different states between 19 April – 1 June. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has deployed 15 million people to oversee the process. Votes will be cast using electronic machines in more than a million polling booths.
However, while the ECI has in the past commanded significant respect, this year there have been many concerns raised about the accuracy of voter lists and mass omissions, especially of Muslim voters. Concerns also include the lack of data available on polling figures, the possibility of fraud in the use of electronic machines and the ECI’s lack of action against the ruling party’s inflammatory campaigning towards the opposition and minorities, including Muslims.
Key players
More than 2,600 political parties have registered to contest in this election – 543 politicians will be elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament. Two additional members will be nominated, making up a total 545.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are running for a third consecutive term – most surveys and opinion polls predict another victory for them. The BJP single-handedly controls 12 of India’s 28 states, while the Congress governs three states.
Gendered politics
In September 2023, the Indian parliament passed the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (Women Power Act), a bill that guarantees a third of seats for women in the lower house of parliament and state assemblies.
The passing of this bill was called historic and speakers from the treasury benches in both houses applauded the prime minister for his efforts. However, the country also has a history of powerful women politicians. In 1966, Indira Gandhi was elected to be the first female prime minister of India. Additionally, the World Economic Forum‘s annual global gender gap report ranked India in the top 20 countries worldwide for numerous years. In 2013, India ranking ninth best, higher than Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, France and United Kingdom.
However, as senior analysts have pointed out, in 1952 the first lower house of parliament had five percent female MPs and while this number has risen to 15 percent since the 2019 elections, it continues to be low. In legislative assemblies, data shows it’s even poorer, at 9 percent.
IDS researchers warn against the co-option and manipulation of feminist or gender empowerment discourses that serve the right-wing agenda. They write, “a central motif of Modi’s 2024 election campaign is what his party, the BJP, has termed ‘women-led’ development. Triumphant declarations of Modi-powered ‘Nari Shakti’ (women power) in rallies, the BJP 2024 manifesto, and international platforms like the G20 represent what Lewin calls ‘discourse capture’”.
Health policy
According to the Indian government statistics, the country has had the second-highest number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the world (after the United States of America) with 45,036,953 confirmed deaths.
However, while a 2019 post-election survey found that people expect the government to take responsibility for providing basic medical care, healthcare is not considered an electoral issue for voters. The study found that less than one percent of voters said health was a consideration when voting. In general, political parties do not focus on health care or medical infrastructure in their campaigns or party manifestos either.
Climate change
Indian people are affected by some of the worst and unprecedented climate change disasters, this includes heatwaves, floods, droughts and landslides.
However, an official pre-poll survey shows voters are mainly concerned with unemployment and inflation. In fact, no major Indian political parties focus on climate change in their manifestos, with the exception of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) – the current ruling party in the state of Tamil Nadu. DMK lays out grassroots-level plans to mitigate the impact of climate change such as providing disaster protection tools and training to the coastal villages, installation of flood forecasting systems in rivers prone to flooding, transforming the existing urban centres to be flood resistant, and the conversion of all major union and state government offices in Tamil Nadu to be solar power by 2030.
Sanitation
India has historically had a significant sanitation problem and until recently had the world’s highest prevalence of open defecation. In recent years, sanitation has received increasing policy attention through high profile national government programmes such as the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). These interventions have tended to focus largely on hardware issues of toilet construction and stopping open defecation. While Prime Minister Modi claimed in 2019 that India was open defecation free, this remains highly disputed. Recent studies have revealed that at least one-sixth of India’s rural population still defecate in the open and a quarter does not have basic sanitation access.
While recent sanitation efforts have led to an exponential rise in toilets, they remain unsafe and there is leaking of faecal waste contaminating ground and surface water. Faecal sludge and wastewater management and treatment still remain significant challenges in most Indian cities and towns.
Furthermore, researchers have found that sanitation programmes have systematically neglected issues of sustainability and equity, failing to address what happen to gender and caste-based inequalities that reinforce the discrimination and marginalization of vulnerable groups in the sanitation sector. While constitutional amendments have corrected this discrimination and legislation mandates the provision of personal protective equipment this rarely happens in practice. Furthermore, India’s sanitation workers still struggle with caste and gender-based discrimination and, though prohibited by law, manual scavenging still persists.
Looking ahead
Voting will soon come to a close after nearly six weeks of elections. A pre-poll survey by Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) found that the BJP hold a commanding 12 percentage points lead over the opposition. Suggesting that despite the economic distress, rising unemployment and inflation rates, over half of the respondents were satisfied with the BJP.
However, political economist and social commentator Parakala Prabhakar has warned against a future where the BJP and Modi stay in power.
According to journalist Vaibhav Vats, public faith and trust in a fair, democratic election has weakened as “Modi has plowed the level playing field” from when he rose in power. Vats writes that this is because electoral processes “have seemingly abdicated their constitutional mandate and are helping make Modi’s third bid for prime minister into something resembling a coronation.”
