India: Election Commission begins counting, Modi assured of victory

Indian nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi must win a third term at the head of the country on Tuesday at the end of an electoral marathon marked by the weakening of the opposition and the rise of concerns about the rights of minorities.

The electronic counting began Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. (02:30 GMT) in the electoral centers of each state and the results are expected in the following hours.

Mr. Modi, 73, who remains very popular after two terms, declared this weekend certain that “the Indian people voted in record numbers” to re-elect him, ten years after his accession to the head of the country. most populous in the world with 1.4 billion inhabitants.

His feeling is shared by observers who believe that he is assured of winning at the end of a campaign marked by his increasingly strong appeals to Hindu nationalist sentiment.

The big unknown remains whether his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will obtain the two-thirds qualified majority in the lower house, as he aims.

Opponents of the Prime Minister, sometimes paralyzed by internal struggles, have had difficulty influencing this powerful organization and have accused the government of exploiting justice for political ends by increasing the number of proceedings against them.

The American foundation Freedom House also estimated that the BJP had “increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents”.

On Sunday, one of the most prominent figures of the opposition, Arvind Kejriwal, chief minister of Delhi who had called to “vote against dictatorship”, returned to prison. Accused of having received bribes to grant alcohol licenses to private companies, he was released on bail last month, time to campaign.

“World record”

The Modi government's Hindu nationalist orientation is causing growing anxiety among the roughly 200 million Muslims in the world's largest, constitutionally secular democracy.

His comments regarding the Muslim community, whom he readily describes as “infiltrators”, have also drawn criticism from opposition leaders.

India uses electronic machines to enable rapid counting of ballots.

Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar on Monday praised “the incredible power of Indian democracy” and assured that a “robust counting process was in place”.

Major Indian television channels deployed reporters outside counting centers to broadcast the results for the 543 seats in the lower house.

In recent years, the main trends emerged in the middle of the afternoon, with the losers conceding defeat, even if the full and final results did not come until late at night from Tuesday to Wednesday.

It is at the BJP headquarters that members of Mr. Modi's supporters are preparing to celebrate their victory.

During the last elections in 2019, this party won 303 seats, 31 more than the absolute majority.