Indians cast votes on key day for country's general elections

Tens of millions of Indians cast their votes on Thursday as the country's five-week general election neared the halfway mark and Congress party politicians faced the prospect of being swept from power by an opposition landslide.

From Kashmir in the north to Karnataka in the south, voters were choosing candidates for 121 of the 543 elected parliamentary seats, with Thursday deciding the largest number of constituencies among the nine voting dates. The last day is on May 12, and ballots are counted four days later.

Narendra Modi, prime ministerial candidate of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, is expected to emerge victorious at the head of a coalition government after a decade of Congress rule marked by corruption scandals, high inflation and slowing growth.

The latest opinion poll this week, for NDTV television, predicted the BJP and its allies would win 275 seats without needing to court new partners - just enough to form a majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament.

India's elections, however, are notoriously hard to predict because of the multiplicity of parties in the contest and the Westminster-style system of geographical constituencies. More than 800m people are eligible to vote in the world's largest exercise in democracy.

Mr Modi, described as "business-friendly" by foreign and Indian investors, is regarded with suspicion by many Muslims and liberal Hindus because of his role as chief minister of Gujarat at a time when hundreds of Muslims were murdered by Hindu mobs in 2002.

In television interviews before the big voting day, he reaffirmed his innocence and repeated that he "should be hanged in the town square" if there was any truth in allegations of his involvement in the slaughter.

Describing the Congress-led administration as a "lame duck" government, a confident Mr Modi said the BJP would win more seats in this election than any party in the last 25 years.

"The mood is building for a strong government with more than 300 seats, with the power to take decisions in parliament," he said.

Mr Modi also described the Congress government's decision to target Vodafone with retroactive tax legislation after the telecoms group had won a Supreme Court victory as "a breach of trust" that had deterred foreign investors in India.

Rahul Gandhi - the son, grandson and great-grandson of former Indian prime ministers - is the Congress figurehead seen as the underdog in the election battle. He and his party colleagues have sought to claw back support from a sceptical electorate by portraying Mr Modi as a Hindu militant who favours big business and scorns India's Muslims and its poor.

"Mr Modi has a strong predilection for crony capitalism," Mr Gandhi said in an interview with south Indian newspaper Vijaya Karnataka. "Our opponents . . . want an India in which there is no place for the poor, no place for those with a different religion or ideology - an India in which power is centralised in the hands of an individual."

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