On Saturday, 16 March, the Election Commission of India announced the dates for India’s upcoming 2024 General Elections. They are to take place between 19 April to 1 June, over a period of forty-two days and in a total of seven phases. These elections are the second longest to ever be held in the country, with the longest being the first ever General Elections held in 1951. Conducted 3 years after Indian independence from colonial British rule, the first General Elections took place over a four month period in a total of sixty-eight phases. While in 1951 the eligible number of voters was 170 million and the voter turnout an impressive 45.7%, this number has risen significantly higher since then in a country often dubbed “the largest democracy in the world.” In 2024, a whopping 969 million Indian voters will be eligible to take part in the democratic process of voting for their representatives.
The elections will be held to elect 543 members of the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Indian Parliament), with the leader of the majority party/coalition ultimately becoming the Prime Minister for the next 5 years. The main contenders include the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) led coalition of parties, with the incumbent Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, at its helm, and the Indian Developmental Inclusive Alliance (‘INDIA’)—a coalition composed of 40 political parties and led by the Indian National Congress (INC). The INDIA bloc will be looking to topple the grip that the Hindu-nationalist BJP has held over the country for the last ten years.
The report card of the incumbent BJP government through its past two terms includes the implementation of various Hindu-nationalist policies which it had promised to its voters when it first came to power in 2014. For instance, in January 2024, it oversaw the inauguration of the contentious Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. This temple has been built on the former site of an Islamic mosque (called the Babri Masjid) which was demolished by a Hindu-nationalist mob in 1992—an event which then led to mass rioting, communal violence, and a significant death toll. Despite this divisive and bloody political history, the temple was inaugurated with much fanfare this year and advertised as a win for the Modi-led BJP government. Similarly, in March 2024, the government also finalized the implementation of a controversial amendment to the constitution, known as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which allows an easier route to citizenship for persecuted minorities belonging to certain religious groups from certain neighboring South Asian countries. The initial announcement of the CAA in 2019 had led to outrage and wide-spread protests in India and abroad, mainly due to its implications for the Muslim populations in India and South Asia. The implementation of this Act now, mere weeks before the 2024 election, is a stark reminder of the nationalist, exclusionary platform that the Modi government has always backed, and which may see it through yet another election cycle.
It remains to be seen whether these and other policies will trump economic concerns for Indian voters, who have faced rising rates of inflation, unemployment, and economic inequality in the past decade. Will the ‘largest democracy in the world’ choose to elect a party which has made clear its penchant for divisive, exclusionary politics for a third term? Or will it turn to the opposition coalition aptly titled “INDIA” to show its distaste for the same “divide-and-rule” policies that it may remember from the British colonial era more than seventy-five years ago?