India: the biggest elections the world has ever seen begin

Cash, diamonds, drugs and alcohol. All of this, in huge quantities, is what the Election Commission of India (ECI) has seized since March, the body that must ensure the cleanliness of the largest elections the world has ever seen..

The elections started this Friday and will last for 44 days. Around 970 million citizens (of a very young country where about 1.42 billion people live) have the right to vote, more than 10% of the world's population.

But the most notable news that broke in the run-up to the elections was the value of all the “gifts” distributed by Indian politicians in exchange for votes: a record of more than 530 million euros. They are 100 million more than the sum of the bribes prior to the previous elections.

The ECI has pointed out that the two states where the most assets related to vote buying have been seized are Rajasthan and Gujarat.. They are both in the north. And both are important strongholds of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).. Furthermore, the second is the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (73 years old), the great favorite to win a third consecutive term at the polls.

India historically has a serious problem of endemic corruption, more widespread in the north, in the poorest regions of the most populous country in the world.. Transparency International's annual corruption perception index places this Asian giant in 93rd place out of the 180 nations it analyzes, at the same level as Kazakhstan.. It is common that, during election periods, political leaders and the media campaign against what they call “electoral incentives”, a deep-rooted practice to attract voters.

The shadow of corruption has been surrounding the celebration of the current elections for some time, starting with the controversy unleashed around the electoral bonds that finance – in a very opaque way – political parties.

This system, introduced by the Modi Government in 2017, allows individuals and companies to buy bonds from the State Bank of India, administered by the Executive, and donate them anonymously to any political party, although donations usually go to mostly to the BJP. At the beginning of the year, the Supreme Court declared these bonuses “unconstitutional.”

In addition to the controversy over the financing of the ruling party, the opposition has denounced that the Modi Government has swept away the equality of conditions in the elections after “fabricating” corruption cases against some of the local leaders candidates for the Lok Sabha (the low camera).

The main opposition force, the Congress Party, which has governed the country in 54 of its 76 years since independence, also claimed that tax authorities had frozen its bank accounts for six weeks, hampering the financing of its campaign.. One of the most relevant opposition political figures, Arvind Kejriwal, head of the Government of New Delhi, was arrested last month in a corruption case.

Results: June 4

The elections to elect 543 deputies will be held in seven phases over six weeks by the 22 states and federally administered regions. They will end on June 1 and the results will be available on the 4th. It is impossible to concentrate the celebration of Indian democracy on a single day due to the enormous size of an electoral list larger than the sum of the populations of Russia, the United States, Brazil, Japan and the United Kingdom.

More than a million and a half electoral centers will open in a phased manner even in the most remote and inaccessible regions, with mules, camels and elephants carrying ballot boxes and ballots to the isolated mountain towns, jungles and deserts. For the first time, the Electoral Commission has said that elderly and disabled people can vote from home by postal vote.

“We will bring democracy to every corner of India,” promised Rajiv Kumar, director of the commission, who recalled an extreme case that occurred in the 2019 general elections: five officials traveled by bus and on foot for two days so that it could exercise her right to vote a woman who lived isolated in a village near the border with China in the Himalayas.

Modi's BJP, which now has a parliamentary majority (352 seats including the support of its coalition partners), hopes to expand its dominance by occupying more than 400 of the 543 seats in Parliament. Not even the super alliance formed by two dozen opposition parties, called the Indian National Alliance for Inclusive Development (INDIA), seems likely to remove a leader increasingly revered by a fervent nationalist tide.

The main rival of Indian leader Raul Gandhi of the Congress Party owes his popularity to a family lineage that begins with his great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of independent India.. His grandmother and father also later served as rulers of the country.

But the problem that Gandhi faces – he has denounced that the elections are “rigged” -, no matter how many allies he has sought to confront the BJP, is that Modi, surrounded by a growing cult of his personality, has broad support from of the Hindu community, which represents 80% of the population. He has hooked the most extremist Hindus with a campaign against religious minorities, especially Muslims.

Much of the media narrative is driven by the ruling party, which reminds almost daily of the prime minister's achievements: leading the economy to be the fastest growing in the world, promising to be a developed nation by 2047, and technological milestones such as reach the far side of the moon. Many voters are confident that, with Modi at the helm, India can aspire to be a superpower one day.