Millions vote in Phase 6 of India’s staggered elections despite heatwave warning | News on India’s 2024 election

Many people lined up outside polling stations before voting began at 7 a.m. to avoid the scorching midsummer sun.

Millions of Indians have cast their votes in the penultimate round of a grueling national election as the united opposition seeks to prevent Prime Minister Narendra Modi from winning his rare third consecutive term in office.

Many people lined up outside polling stations before voting began at 7am (01:30 GMT) on Saturday to avoid the scorching mid-summer sun later in the day.

In the capital New Delhi, temperatures rose to 43 degrees Celsius in the afternoon. India’s weather service issued a “red heat warning” this week for the city and surrounding states, where tens of millions of people cast their votes.

Lakshmi Bansal, a housewife, said in hot weather, people usually go out for shopping and even attend festivals.

“This (election) is also like a festival, so I have no problem voting in the heat,” Bansal said.

Almost 970 million voters – more than 10 percent of the world’s population – were entitled to elect 543 members to the lower house of parliament for a five-year term.

In Saturday’s vote in 58 constituencies, including seven in New Delhi, 89.5 percent of the 543 seats in the lower house of parliament were voted on.

Voting for the remaining 57 seats on June 1 will conclude the six-week election. The votes will be counted on June 4.

President Droupadi Murmu and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar were among the first voters. Opposition Congress Party leaders Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi also cast their votes in New Delhi.

Mehbooba Mufti, former chief minister of Indian-administered Kashmir, held a protest rally with her supporters on Saturday, alleging that scores of her party workers were detained by police to prevent them from voting. Mufti, the leader of the People’s Democratic Party, which is contesting the assembly elections in Anantnag-Rajouri district, said she had complained to election officials.

In the state of West Bengal, All India Trinamool Congress Party workers blocked the car of Agnimitra Paul, one of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidates, as she was trying to cast her vote in the Medinipur constituency. The two parties are rivals in the state and their workers often clash on the road.

“Opposition is doing better than expected”

This election is considered one of the most consequential in India’s history and will test Modi’s political dominance. If Modi wins, he will become only the second Indian leader to remain in power for a third term, after Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister.

Modi ran his election campaign like a presidential election, a referendum on his decade-long rule. He claimed to help the poorest with charity, providing free healthcare, installing toilets in their homes and providing women with free or cheap gas cylinders for cooking.

But after the low turnout in the first round, Modi changed course and began to stoke Hindu nationalism by accusing the Congress Party of trying to steal votes from Muslim minorities.

80 percent of India’s more than 1.4 billion inhabitants are Hindus, and almost 14 percent are Muslims.

“When the elections started, it felt like it was a neck-and-neck race with Modi in the lead. But now we are seeing a kind of turnaround,” said political analyst Rasheed Kidwai.

“The opposition is doing better than expected and it seems that Modi’s party is unsettled. This is why Modi is stepping up his anti-Islam rhetoric to polarise voters.”

“Vote against the dictatorship”

According to analyst Kidwai, the opposition has challenged Modi by focusing its election campaign on the issues of social justice and rising unemployment, making the election campaign closer than expected.

Prominent opponents include Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, 55, leader of the opposition Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

“Please go and vote, exercise your right to vote and vote against the dictatorship,” Kejriwal said after casting his vote.

Kejriwal was arrested in March as part of a lengthy corruption case and detained for several weeks before the Supreme Court released him on bail earlier this month and he was able to resume his campaign.

The investigators “had no evidence and arrested him anyway,” 42-year-old opposition voter Yogesh Kumar told AFP news agency. “This is a blatant show of force.”

In fact, Kejriwal’s imprisonment benefited the AAP, Neelanjan Sircar of the Centre for Policy Research told Al Jazeera.

“When people saw that Arvind Kejriwal was arrested, they thought that the BJP was actually putting someone in jail who was a legitimate opposition politician,” Sircar said. “Kejriwal’s imprisonment has convinced the BJP how popular he really is.”

Modi’s political opponents and international human rights activists have long been raising the alarm about India’s shrinking democratic space.

The US think tank Freedom House said this year that the BJP had “increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents”.