India is about to go to the polls, but not before a splash of colour

Vote sees 900 million people make their voices heard and is more than a month in the making

With the opening of nominations for candidates, this week kicked off the most extraordinary democratic spectacle on Earth – the Indian general election.

The numbers underpinning the exercise are truly staggering. An estimated 900 million people are eligible to vote out of a population of more than 1.3 billion. Turnout is traditionally solid – at the last general election in 2014, 553 million votes were cast – or about 66 per cent of the electorate.

The country is so sprawling that voting will take place not over a day or two but across more than a month, in seven stages, between 11 April and 19 May. The Election Commission of India, itself a behemoth of an independent authority with 300 full-time staff in its Delhi HQ alone, set up 927,553 polling stations in 2014, each serving an average of around 900 voters.

Reporting on such an operation clearly presents some challenges, from the logistics of where to be at any given time to the delicate issue of bringing our international readership the news that matters, without getting too bogged down in the nitty gritty.

And it would be more foolish still to try to predict which way the vote will go. Opinion polling suggests Narendra Modi might struggle to win the easy re-election he was hoping for, but it’s hard to read into it any more than that.

It’s fair to say Modi himself has been in election mode for many months now, dishing out big, populist, vote-winning policies. This week he has kickstarted a nationwide trend by changing his Twitter handle to “Chowkidar [watchman] Narendra Modi”, positioning himself as the watchman of the nation, implicitly in the face of alleged national security threats from Pakistan.

Between now and results day on 23 May there’s sure to be plenty more colour, so it’s appropriate that it is only really after today – Holi, the festival of colour – that the majority of parties will start their political activities.

Some attribute this to superstition, while others say it is simply because Wednesday and Thursday are government holidays, and it makes sense to let people focus on celebrating the festivities before the real work gets underway.

Raucous, jubilant and – given the violence with which colour is thrown at all and sundry – to some even a little threatening, Holi is still only the calm before the storm that is the election season. Then, we can let the real action begin.

Yours,

Adam Withnall

Asia editor