Indian Elections Scheduled for April and May

March 2, 2009
NEW DELHI — India, the world’s largest democracy, will hold its next national elections over four weeks starting next month, election officials announced Monday afternoon, as the country’s leading national parties scrambled to join forces with a host of regional and caste-based parties under the shadow of a deepening economic slowdown.

India has been ruled by coalition governments for over a decade, making the country’s national parties increasingly reliant on smaller factions. That trend is only expected to intensify.

In a vast and fractious exercise scheduled to take place in five phases between April 16 and May 13, 714 million voters will be eligible to elect the next legislature. Votes will be counted on May 16, and a new government will have to be formed by June, when the current Congress Party-led coalition government’s five year term comes to an end.

The elections come amid the worst global economic crisis in decades, which has fueled a palpable deceleration in the once-roaring Indian economy: The growth in the gross domestic product fell to 5.3 percent in the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2008, from 9 percent last year. That in turn will compel the incumbent government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to defend its record against charges of mismanagement from its main rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Neither national party is likely to win enough seats in the 543-seat parliament without joining forces with other parties. If neither party wins enough seats to command a coalition, the door will be opened to what is known here as a third front: a loose cartel of smaller parties joining together to form a government.

The economy is expected to dominate the polls in a country where nearly one in four eligible voters are estimated to be under the age of 30. The electorate contains 43 million first-time voters. Age does not seem to be a hurdle to India’s leading politicians. The leader of the B.J.P., Lal Krishna Advani, is 80, while Mr. Singh, the Congress Party’s presumed prime ministerial candidate, is 76.

For the election commission, just scheduling a national election is complicated enough, balancing holidays, religious festivals, planting seasons, expected bad weather and school exams. The scale of the actual elections is another matter. More than 828,000 polling stations will be set up. They will be staffed by 4 million election workers; an additional 2.1 million police and home guards are due to be deployed. The polling will take place in phases in order to ensure sufficient security across the country.

Most seats for the legislature have been redrawn; the redistricting will give greater representation to India’s outcastes and indigenous tribes.

The three-member election commission itself has been under a rare cloud, with the chief election commissioner, N. Gopalaswami, accusing one of his fellow panelists, Navin Chawla, of pro-Congress partisanship and calling for his removal. The Indian president, Pratibha Patil, rejected the request over the weekend, at the advice of the Congress-led government.