NEW DELHI: India’s election commission on Saturday announced seven-stage Lok Sabha polls from April 19 with the results to be announced on June 4. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in a bid for a third consecutive term in the 45-day contest for 543 seats. The winning party needs 272 to form a government.

The ruling BJP won 303 on its own in the 2019 polls, the campaign dominated by a whipped up and short-lived military confrontation with Pakistan. The 2014 elections launched Mr Modi to his first term as prime minister office, and was framed in the communal conflagration of Muzaffarnagar.

Mr Modi has been scouting for issues to click with the voters, of which the Ram temple he inaugurated on the ruins of the Babri masjid in Ayodhya was planned to take the lead. But media accounts suggest the souffle has not risen. With an advantage of virtual monopoly on TV channels he has been promoting India and his own role as a professor of the world, a Vishwa guru. TV channels bombarded viewers with claims last week of Indian initiative in Ukraine that prevented a nuclear war, a claim rooted in misplaced bombast.

Could there be a real or falsely claimed action on the China front this time? Mr Modi will reportedly visit Bhutan next week, a quick follow up on talks with the Bhutanese prime minister in Delhi this week. The visit would make him the first prime minister to go on a foreign tour during elections.

Modi is scouting for issues to click with voters

On the table could be discussions on the Doklam region where borders of China and India converge with Bhutan. Doklam was the venue of a bristling dispute between Indian and Chinese troops in 2017. India recently moved 10,000 troops to the China border.

The most populous state of Uttar Pradesh with 80 seats in the fray would see contests in all seven stages, the same with West Bengal, which sends 42 MPs and Bihar with 40 seats. The BJP won 18 seats in West Bengal in 2019 and Ms Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress had won 22. The Congress got two and the communist-led Left Front drew a blank, a shade worse than the two seats it won in 2014.

Mr Modi says he is confident of crossing 400 seats tally with its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners, with the BJP eyeing 370.

The rival INDIA group says it expects to evict Mr Modi from office in the elections with nearly 970 million voters across a million plus polling stations. The BJP has a tally of 37.7 per cent of the votes from the last contest.

Maharashtra with 48 seats will witness a five-phased election battle between the NDA and the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi involving the Congress and Shiv Sena.

In Karnataka, the BJP had won 25 out of 28 seats in the 2019 elections. However, the Congress would be hoping to translate its 2023 assembly poll triumph into Lok Sabha success this time.

In Andhra Pradesh, the BJP has tied up with Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party and Pawan Kalyan’s Jana Sena against Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSRCP. Telangana, the new state carved out of Andhra witnessed a Congress victory last December. The grand old party, which ended the 10-year-long reign of K Chandrasekhar Rao’s BRS, would be eyeing a 2023 rerun.

In Tamil Nadu, INDIA allies DMK and Congress would be eyeing a strong performance against the AIADMK. The BJP, on the other hand, is hoping to mark its presence by capitalising on the controversy over Udhayanidhi Stalin’s remark against the ‘Sanatan Dharma’.

In Kerala, the CPM is currently the ruling party. The BJP has fielded Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar against three-time Congress MP Shashi Tharoor in Thiruvananthapuram.

Published in Dawn, March 17th, 2024