Security heavy for final phase of India elections :: Namibia Internet Gateway cc ::

Articles: Security heavy for final phase of India elections

Posted by admin on Monday, May 10, 2004 - 02:28 AM

NEW DELHI -- More than 1 million security personnel were on heightened alert across 16 Indian states yesterday, a day before the final and biggest round of parliamentary elections in the world's most populous democracy.
Today, 16 states will vote for 182 of Parliament's 543 elected seats, wrapping up the five-phase balloting. Some 215 million people are eligible to vote at more than 218,000 polling stations. More than 2,100 candidates are in the running in the final phase. Vote counting begins May 13, and the results are expected more quickly than in previous polls because a million electronic voting machines have been installed around the country. Although Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's National Democratic Alliance was far ahead of the main opposition Congress party and its allies, most pollsters have predicted from the previous four rounds of voting that the 11-party coalition will not win the 272 seats required for an outright majority. Vajpayee has appeared worried that the NDA could lose its majority and be forced into horse-trading with smaller parties to form a government. That raises the risk of an unstable government, which may not last the full five-year term or be able to implement its policies. "The decision you have to make is whether we need a stable, strong, lasting and performing government, or instability," Vajpayee said at his last election rally in the northern city of Ludhiana, in Punjab, on Saturday. After a weeks-old noisy and chaotic political campaign in soaring temperatures, streets were silent yesterday, a day after campaigning officially ended. At least 43 people have been killed across India in election-related violence since April 19, the eve of the first voting phase. The figure, though, is much lower than in the last polls in 1999, when there were 100 deaths.

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