India on Saturday announced its six-week-long general election will start on April 19, with most surveys predicting a victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in the country of 1.4 billion people.
Voting in the world’s largest democracy will stretch over seven phases, with different states voting at different times, and results will be announced on June 4. More than 970 million voters — more than 10 per cent of the world’s population — will elect 543 members for the lower house of Parliament for a term of five years.
“We will take democracy to every corner of the
