India’s 18th Lok Sabha election begins today. Candidates have spent so long busy campaigning around the polls. The popular party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is very confident about this election. They are even claiming to win 400 seats in the election.
BJP leader and Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi has promised to get more than 400 seats in this year’s Lok Sabha elections. In the election campaign, he said, this time his alliance will win more than four hundred seats in the 543-seat parliament. His party will single-handedly win over 370 seats. However, Al Jazeera’s analysis shows how reasonable Modi’s dream of 400 seats is.
Analysts claim that Modi’s chances of winning 400 seats are ambitious considering the state of the coalition. They claim that whether BJP’s hopes will be fulfilled depends on a particular region. It is the southern part of India. Known to be impenetrable to BJP since long. About 20 percent of India’s total population lives in the five southern states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Telangana. These states are also economically strong. They contribute 30 percent to India’s GDP.
Narendra Modi has been saying that his government has enriched India’s economy. However, BJP won only 30 out of 131 seats in these regions in 2019 elections. Most of the seats are from Karnataka. The party could not make gains in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. As a result, like many experts, the previous election is going to repeat itself. In the last elections BJP won 303 out of 543 seats. Most of them are from the northern states of India. These states are traditionally known as BJP strongholds.
It has already been reported that the Election Commission of India (ECI) website has been ‘blocked’ for Indian users outside the country for several months. In a report on Thursday, the Indian media The Hindu reported this news. It said the “impacted” sites included the ECI’s landing page, its voter registration portal and its Right to Information portal. ECI declined to comment on the reasons for blocking websites for users outside India.
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