Millions voted yesterday in Gujarat where Chief Minister Narendra Modi is seeking a big win to spur his prime ministerial ambitions, 10 years after anti-Muslim riots on his watch.
Crowds thronged polling stations in the first of two rounds of voting in the western state, one of India’s fastest developing regions that has been run since 2001 by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader.
Polling officials said over 12mn people out of the 38mn-strong electorate had cast their ballots in the first seven hours, amid reports that many more were still queuing up at voting centres.
An estimated 68% of the 18mn eligible to vote in the first phase exercised their franchise yesterday, the Election Commission said.
It was the highest voting percentage since the 61.54% in 2002. This slid to 59.77% in 2007.
In New Delhi, the Election Commission said the nine-hour polling was “totally peaceful and historic.”
Both the BJP and the Congress have asserted they will win but the election is widely seen as a referendum on Modi’s 11 years of controversial rule.
The third major player is the Gujarat Parivartan Party (GPP) of former chief minister Keshubhai Patel, who parted ways with the BJP after giving up the chief minister’s chair to Modi in 2001.
“It is a BJP storm in Gujarat,” Modi announced at an election rally in the state’s Siddhpur region. “Wherever there is voting, records of all previous polls have been broken,” he told cheering supporters.
Modi, who has secured thumping victories in the last two polls, is looking to secure another sizeable majority for the BJP to bolster his reputation, which was stained by religious riots in Gujarat in 2002.
Though he has never declared his ambition to be prime minister, his desire for the top spot in his party is an open secret and he is widely thought to be angling to lead the BJP into national elections due in 2014.
Modi’s links to some of the worst sectarian violence in post-independence India make him a hate-figure for many Muslims and secularists.
He is blamed by some rights groups for turning a blind eye to the unrest in which as many as 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in an orgy of violence that saw many victims set alight or hacked to death in public. He denies any wrongdoing.
Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, who might face Modi in the 2014 national polls, has campaigned locally where he accused his rival of being autocratic and ignoring the poor in the home state of Mahatma Gandhi.
“He wants to hear only his own voice. He has his dream and he thinks only about his own dream,” Gandhi told supporters on Tuesday.
The final phase of the balloting is scheduled for December 17, with counting to take place three days later.
Some 100,000 security personnel including federal troopers are on duty at around 45,000 polling stations - some 17,000 of which are labelled “vulnerable” to violence - the state home department said.
On Wednesday, Modi was back in the headlines after claiming the federal government was set to “hand over” a disputed strip of water in Gujarat to neighbour Pakistan.
“I would earnestly request you to stop this dialogue with Pakistan at once and Sir Creek should not be handed over to Pakistan,” Modi wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, released by his party.
Singh, who has pushed a peace dialogue with Pakistan, countered that the letter was a “mischievous” and “baseless” stunt ahead of the election.