NEW DELHI, April 19: Indians will begin voting on Tuesday in a four-stage election that will test Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's all-out bid for a fourth term in office and a daring opposition attempt to unseat him.
The first stage of the polls will cover 141 Lok Sabha seats involving 13 states and smaller federally-administered union territories. These include all the 26 seats in the border state of Gujarat, ruled by Mr Vajpayee's right-wing Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP). Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishan Advani is among the BJP candidates there.
Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, seeking a straight third term from Hazairbagh in Jharkhand, formerly part of Bihar, is another key candidate in the fray on Tuesday. Mr Sinha is said to be in trouble because of a rebellion within the local BJP and also due to the opposition parties' joint effort to put up a single candidate against him, a communist.
Some of India's 29 states like Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh will have staggered polls over two days while even more populous states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar will have a three-stage poll. Jammu and Kashmir, which sends six deputies to the Lok Sabha has been slated to have elections on all four days - April 20 and 26, May 5 and 10.
Mr Vajpayee whose margin of victory had come down to a little over a 100,000 votes in the last elections in 1999, from double that figure on the previous occasions, will face polls on May 5. His main opponent is a former cabinet colleague and lawyer, Ram Jethmalani, who has decided to ignore the prime minister's request to step down from the fray. The Congress Party will support Mr Jethmalani.
All results would be declared on May 13, a prospect facilitated by the first time large-scale use of electronic voting machines, which have virtually replaced the old-fashioned ballot paper-and-a-rubber-stamp election.
A single constituency of the 545-member Lok Sabha normally represents around a million voters each. With few clear issues to spar over, the poll campaign has been besmirched with personal attacks on Mr Vajpayee and the opposition Congress party leader, Sonia Gandhi, by each other's followers.
"This is the dirtiest election that I have ever seen," said octogenarian author and columnist Khushwant Singh. The Congress has re-inducted a few tainted leaders who however command popularity. So has the BJP. If this is the farcical aspect of the poll campaign, tragedy too has not been far behind. Twenty-four women were killed in a stampede in Lucknow on April 12 when Mr Vajpayee's election manager was distributing Saris to a throng that became unwieldy.
However, Mr Vajpayee's mounting problems were eased by the local administration of Samajwadi Party Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav. There are growing rumours that he, once seen as a campaigner for Muslim rights, is being soft on Mr Vajpayee possibly as part of a post-poll strategy. The Congress is also wooing Mr Yadav.
The NDA had kicked off the election campaign a month ago with expensive, but controversial ads to project its "India Shining" theme. But these quickly petered out after the NDA leaders themselves discovered not all Indians were receiving their fair share of water, food, education and health care. Many, none at all.
