Why do India’s elections take so long?

Consider what is involved: more than one-eighth of humanity will have the opportunity to vote in April and May. Those voters will speak 22 official languages and thousands of dialects. Tens of millions will never have learned to read. They will vote from the shadow of the Himalayas right down to the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago; in tribal communities without running water or electricity; in Delhi’s genteel southern neighbourhoods and in the teeming slums of Mumbai.

If that weren’t complicated enough, Indian law mandates that no voter be forced to travel more than 2km to their nearest polling station – in the world’s seventh largest country by landmass. Faced with this logistical challenge, India’s Election Commission holds votes in phases over the course of a few weeks, with results due on 23 May.

That allows its 11 million poll workers and security officers to administer the more than 800,000 polling stations that are required. Most importantly, it allows every voting booth to be secured by federal security forces – who are considered harder to influence or intimidate than local police. These caravans of workers and election machinery shuttle across the country by vehicle, helicopter, camel, elephant, bullock cart and boat. The total cost is put at more than £5bn.

Who gets to vote – and who doesn’t?

Every Indian citizen over 18 is eligible to vote, provided they are not in prison, have not been declared “mentally unsound” or been convicted of electoral crimes such as bribery. The electoral roll this year includes 900m people – about three times the population of the US. More than 84 million of them will be first-time voters, making the aspirations of young India a key election issue.

The franchise has been extended in recent years to include Indian citizens who reside overseas.

The Election Commission touts its commitment to ensuring everyone gets to vote. In a district in Kerala, just a single man was registered to vote. Officials tried to persuade him to travel to a nearby booth. He refused, and so in the 2004 polls, a team of six people established a voting booth for him alone. (He kept them waiting about five hours before he showed up.)

How does it all happen?

People cast their ballots using a briefcase-sized, battery-powered electronic voting machine. The devices are highly controversial. Parties routinely claim the machines are being hacked, programmed to favour the party in power, or deliberately slowed in districts where the ruling party is weak. None of these allegations have ever been proved.

In 2017, the Election Commission invited parties to prove they could hack the voting machines – none were able to do so.

Staff from the commission say the voting machines are more environmentally friendly and prevent sabotage such as ballot stuffing or the theft or destruction of boxes of voting slips.

After voting, each person’s finger is marked with indelible ink, preventing them from voting twice.

Is it first past the post or proportional representation?

The voting system for India’s lower house is first past the post (FPTP), meaning whoever gets the most votes in a particular seat is declared the winner, even if their share is well short of 50%.

Critics of the system say it leads to discrepancies between a party’s vote share and the number of seats it wins in parliament. In the last election, for example, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) won 31% of national votes and captured 282 seats – 114 more seats than it would have won under a proportional representation (PR) system, where seats are allocated based on a party’s share of votes.

Its main opponent, the Congress party, won 19% of the national vote but just 44 seats – 61 fewer than it would have won under PR. Turnout is normally around 60%, but in 2014 a record high 66.4% cast ballots, reflecting the momentum kicked up by prime minister Narendra Modi and his BJP.

What about fraud and violence?

For the vast majority of the country, the elections pass without a hitch. No poll is perfect, and parties are frequently accused of breaking the “model code of conduct” that governs how candidates should campaign, but Hilary Clinton echoed the views of many in 2011 when she called India’s elections the “global gold standard”.

Nonetheless, since the 1970s, violence has been a persistent feature of the polls, though never at a high enough intensity to seriously threaten the process. The most significant threat is in India’s so-called “red belt”, areas where the government has been fighting a Maoist insurgency for more than 50 years.

Will ‘fake news’ be a big issue?

India’s online population is now 500m people – more than double what it was in 2014, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India. The big political parties have built up networks of tens of thousands of online activists who help to push their messages out over Facebook, WhatsApp and newer apps such as the short-video service TikTok.

A lot of what is shared is fake, for example, photos currently making the rounds of a woman in a bikini that some claim is Sonia Gandhi, the matriarch of Congress. (The pictures actually show Ursula Andress, the first Bond girl.)

There is little India’s election authorities can really do to stem the flow of misinformation. But it has drawn up an agreement with major social media companies so try to take down fraudulent information as quickly as possible. The apps themselves are trying to partner with media companies to fact check information, and are warning their users not to believe everything they read.

When do we get the results?

Counting day is 23 May. Each district will begin counting ballots around 8am. In case of a clear result, as in 2014, we are likely to know the shape of the new government by noon. Counting in closer booths may extend to the evening. If no party claims a majority, we may see days of squabbling to form a governing coalition.

The process of building coalitions can be even messier than the campaign. Parties are frequently accused of trying to lure opponents to cross sides with promises of ministries, projects for their constituents – or old fashioned suitcases of cash.

The past few years has seen the rise of “resort politics”, in which party leaders sequester their members in five-star resorts, often taking their phones away, to prevent them from being poached by the other side.

After crossovers became endemic in the 1960s and 1970s – one Haryana state legislator changed parties three times one day in 1967 – an anti-defection law was inserted into the Indian constitution.

On paper, it bans elected members from changing parties or joining new ones after the polls, but in practice, the law is inconsistently applied and party-shopping still occurs.

What do the elections decide?

The elections decide the makeup of the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house. The group that can form a governing coalition becomes the government and their leader becomes the prime minister.

India’s upper house, or Rajya Sabha – similar to Britain’s House of Lords – is made up of notable people chosen by the Indian president and people elected by members of India’s 29 state assemblies.

The main contenders with a nationwide presence are:





What’s at stake this time around?

Modi and his supporters would say that India is finding its feet as a world power. It has a leader who has used his big majority to cement some important and long-delayed reforms, such as a goods and services tax, the world’s largest free medical scheme for the poor and a national bankruptcy law.

But all the pillars of “new India” are yet to be laid. Modi supporters say he needs another term to implement land reform, bring in a national social security scheme and continue rolling out Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identity database. His Hindu nationalist base would add: he needs more time to reshape the nation’s character and institutions from the secular, multicultural vision of India’s first prime minister, Jawarharlal Nehru, into the essentially Hindu nation the country really is at its core.

His opponents, including the Congress party president Rahul Gandhi, say Modi has spent five years undermining the country’s free institutions: meddling in the supreme court, intimidating the media, undermining the reserve bank and encouraging police to look the other way as Hindu mobs target Muslims and other minorities. They say he has failed to create jobs, is ruining India’s reputation as a tolerant country, and is running a “billionaire Raj”, favouring some of the country’s wealthiest corporate titans over the poor.

Modi’s strongman style has prompted a fierce backlash. Opposition leaders with divergent agendas have put them aside to form anti-Modi alliances. Regional politicians such as Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal say they are now campaigning to “save democracy”. In Utter Pradesh, the country’s most populous state, bitter arch-rivals Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati have banded together to try to deny Modi another majority. It is clear that no one party will be able to dethrone the Indian prime minister, but a broad coalition of leaders may be able to pull it off.

What does the data show?

India’s political scene is extraordinarily complicated, with thousands of candidates and hundreds of parties jostling to forge alliances that cut across caste, religious and linguistic divisions. Even pollsters struggle to comprehend it, and few have been able to accurately predict the result of the last three national elections.

In December, Modi’s BJP lost three state elections in a single day. Echoing that downturn, most polls in the first two months of this year showed the BJP shedding seats and failing to win a majority of parliament, though it was still in the largest party in the house. But since Indian jets crossed into and bombed Pakistan last month, in the worst clashes between the neighbours in decades, Modi’s support appears to have rallied. Three polls so far in March have shown him winning a narrow majority, though the wisest observers treat the opinion data with scepticism.

What are the big issues?

The issues that matter to India’s 1.3 billion citizens can vary from district to district. Campaigns are finely tuned to appeal to particular constituency. In one notable example, members of the Hindu nationalist BJP were arguing they would try to curtail the slaughter of cows in a majority Hindu region of the country, while arguing they would improve the quality of beef in a majority Christian one. But there are some broad national issues: