India began voting Monday in a general election, a process that Indians proudly refer to as the world’s biggest exercise in democracy. But there was great doubt that this election would end the political instability that has dogged India for nearly two years.
Voting will take place in four stages and is expected to conclude with a result as early as March 3 even though two small states will not vote until March 7.
Initial reports Monday suggested that the turnout among those eligible to vote in the early balloting may have been 50 percent, low by the measure of past elections in which turnouts usually have exceeded 60 percent.
Indian political commentators said voter apathy stemmed from a fear that this election will likely produce a “hung Parliament,” or another shaky coalition that may have to struggle to last a full five-year term.
There had been expectations that the close contest between the two leading groups, the Congress Party led by Sonia Gandhi and the Hindu nationalists under the banner of the Bharatiya Janata Party, might overcome the sense of political malaise.
Opinion polls in Indian newspapers last weekend pointed toward an alliance of parties led by Bharatiya Janata winning 210 to 240 seats of the 545 in the lower house of Parliament, against 150 to 170 seats for the Congress Party.
Some of the tensions between the two parties were evident at polling stations in Old Delhi, an area of the capital where Muslims and Hindus live close together.
In the Chandni Chowk area police separated crowds of Congress and Bharatiya Janata supporters, each alleging voting irregularities against the other. At one point, a police van drove off with several Bharatiya Janata supporters who allegedly had tried to vote more than once.
Another point at issue was the role played in the election by Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of Rajiv Gandhi, the former Congress Party leader assassinated while campaigning in the 1991 election.
While Muslims argued the virtues of Gandhi, Bharatiya Janata supporters decried her non-Indian origins. “People don’t like it because she’s not Indian,” said S.P. Bajaj, a 48-year-old employee of the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank. “She has taken Indian nationality after 15 years of her marriage. Why should we accept that? In America, your Constitution says you cannot be president . . . unless you are born in America.”
Of the 220 seats being contested across 15 of India’s 25 states in Monday’s voting, more than 140 were in a band of states in the north. It’s an essential battleground for the Bharatiya Janata which finds the core of its support in the so-called “Hindi belt” states in north and western India.
In many of these states, the Congress Party, once an almost unstoppable force in Indian elections, has become a marginal contestant. The next two rounds of voting, on Sunday and Feb. 28, will carry the contest into areas of eastern, central and southern India where support for Congress is stronger than it is for Bharatiya Janata.
The Press Trust of India, the country’s principal news agency, reported 22 deaths in a series of election clashes, mainly in the eastern states of Assam and Bihar.
The violence in Assam, including land mine explosions and the kidnapping of six election officials, centered on attacks by separatists who called for a boycott.
In Bihar, considered the most violent state in the country, much of the violence involved left-wing extremists called Naxalites. Reports from Bihar spoke of incidents of armed attacks on polling stations, as well as ballot-burning and “booth-capturing,” meaning the occupation of polling stations by party militants.
