NEW DELHI, Oct 6: Polls in four Indian states and the capital New Delhi, seen as litmus tests for the ruling Hindu nationalists, will be held on November 20 and December 1, the Election Commission announced here on Monday.

New Delhi, which is governed by India’s main opposition Congress party, will elect a new city council on December 1, Chief Election Commissioner James Michael Lyngdoh told reporters.

The politically important states of Rajasthan, Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh will vote the same day. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in opposition in all three states.

The remote northeastern state of Mizoram, which is ruled by a legislative ally of the BJP, will elect its provincial assembly November 20, Lyngdoh said.

The elections are seen as an acid test between the BJP and Congress ahead of national elections, which must be held by the beginning of October 2004.

The Congress party led by Sonia Gandhi rules half of India’s 28 states while the BJP has faced a string of humiliating electoral reverses in states such as Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.

The announcement of the dates signals the beginning of free-for-all campaigning and the filing of nominations with electoral authorities who already predict hundreds of hopefuls will contest the polls.

Lyngdoh said the autonomous Election Commission had made fool-proof arrangements to eliminate vote fraud and weed out candidates with criminal backgrounds.

Lyngdoh said ballot counting in Mizoram will not begin until December 2 so the results do not influence the voting in the other states.

“For the first time, resident welfare associations are involved to correct the electoral rolls and they are knocking out (names of) dead people and those who have changed residence from the rolls,” he said.

The Election Commission said it would be mandatory for all the candidates to give an affidavit listing their assets and criminal records in line with a directive of the Supreme Court.

“An intensive revision of electoral rolls for Delhi and Rajasthan has been done in 2001 and the same exercise carried out in Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh in 2002 and 2003,” Lyngdoh said.

“We have done whatever is possible and hundreds of people from other departments have been borrowed for this job,” Lyngdoh said.—AFP