India’s election campaign under way

If anyone had doubts that India’s election campaign was under way, political manoeuvrings in the past week have put them to rest.

First the leader of the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Narendra Modi, was named to contest Varanasi. Currently Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi needs a way into the National Parliament, the Lok Sabha, and chose the eastern Uttar Pradesh city in preference to an easier contest in his home state.

No sooner had the announcement been made then the leader of the newly-formed Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Arvind Kejriwal, said that he would challenge Modi in the seat.

The AAP does not have a single member in the Lok Sabha, but made a startlingly successful debut in the state election for New Delhi where it defeated the sitting Congress Party and briefly formed a minority government.

At a rally in New Delhi, Kejriwal said his candidature was not a symbolic gesture and he planned to defeat Modi. However, most observers believe his real aim is to provide valuable publicity for his fledgling party and perhaps get more of its candidates over the line in other parts of India; Varanasi, the holy city of the nation’s majority Hindus, leans heavily towards the BJP.

Kejriwal went on the offensive, attacking Modi’s much-lauded ‘economic miracle’ in Gujarat, saying it was a myth built on crony capitalism which favoured high-profile multinational companies at the expense of small business.

However, the annual Economic Freedom of the States of India report placed Gujarat solidly at the head of its index as the best place in India in which to do business, with an average annual growth rate of 12 per cent between 2005 and 2011.

One result of the loud debate between the BJP and the AAP is to overshadow the campaign of the governing Congress Party, led by Raul Gandhi, as it struggles to convince voters to stick with it after a decade in power.

The forthcoming election will be the largest exercise in democracy on the planet with 814 million electors casting their votes at almost a million polling stations. Voting will be held on nine days between April 7 and May 12 in different parts of the country to allow sufficient resources to be deployed, with the count beginning on May 16.