NEW DELHI: India announced Saturday that national polls would begin on April 19, with nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi strongly favoured to win a third term in the world's biggest democracy.
Nearly a billion people are eligible to cast ballots in what will be the largest exercise of the democratic franchise in human history, conducted over six weeks.
Modi's opponents have been hamstrung by infighting and what critics say are politically motivated legal investigations aimed at hobbling any challengers to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
"We will take democracy to every corner of the country," chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar said at a press conference in New Delhi announcing the voting dates.
Voting will be staggered over seven stages between April 19 and June 1.
Ballots from around the country will be counted all at once on June 4 and are usually announced on the same day.
Modi, 73, has already begun campaigning as he seeks a repeat of his landslide wins of 2014 and 2019.
The opposition Congress, which led India's independence struggle and ruled the country almost uninterrupted for decades after its conclusion, is meanwhile a shadow of its former self and out of office in all but three of the country's 28 states.
Its leaders have sought to stitch together an alliance of more than two-dozen regionalist parties to present a united front against the BJP's well-oiled and well-funded electoral juggernaut.
But the bloc has been plagued by disputes over seat-sharing deals, suffered the defection of one of its members to the government and has so far been unable to publicly agree which of its leaders will be its prime ministerial candidate.
Published opinion polls are rare in India but a Pew survey last year found Modi was viewed favourably by nearly 80 percent of Indians.
A February poll of urban voters conducted by YouGov showed the BJP comfortably leading India's manifold opposition parties among 47 percent of those surveyed, while Congress was a dismal second at 11 percent.
A total of 970 million people are eligible to vote in the election -- more than the entire population of the United States, European Union and Russia combined.
There will be more than a million polling stations in operation staffed by 15 million poll workers, according to the election commission. — AFP
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