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09-03-2024
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI: From transporting voting machines on camelback to remote corners of its vast western desert to bolstering control rooms for monitoring malicious deep-fakes, India is preparing to run the world’s largest election due by May.
More than 960 million Indians are registered to vote at over one million polling stations across the country in a mammoth electoral exercise with 2,400 political parties that may contest, and during which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will bid for a rare third term.
India could announce in weeks the dates for general elections that Modi is widely expected to comfortably win.
The nation’s election commission tasked with conducting a fair vote will for the first time set up hundreds of control rooms dedicated to spotting fake content on social media.
The teams will continuously monitor feeds, analyze narrative, sentiment and content, the commission’s top officer Rajiv Kumar said at a press briefing on Thursday and “whenever anything which is factually incorrect, they will take whatever action they can take.”
Actions including issuing notices or filing police complaints against creators of content that disturbs a level-playing field, is communally charged or incorrect.
Indian officers may also block web addresses or request social media platforms to take down fake content, Kumar added, armed with legal powers enhanced since India’s last national election in 2019 but “we will tread on this cautiously, as there is a thin line between freedom of speech, criticism and disturbance.”
The Indian election commission’s small scale operation in New Delhi with 400 to 450 officials will quickly expand to rope in 15 million employees to conduct this election.
From transporting voting machines to the world’s highest polling station in the nation’s north at 15,000 feet (4572 m) above sea level, or visiting homes of some octogenarians to collect votes these employees will do it all.
The commission hopes the country’s 2019 record voter turnout of 67% will improve and has hosted awareness programs for voters in regions where fewer people voted than the national average, Kumar said.
Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister ruling Hindu nationalist party will secure a clear majority in general elections this summer, a win that will ensure a comfortable third term for Modi, an opinion poll showed on Thursday.
Findings from the “Mood of the Nation Poll”, a survey by private media group India Today, showed that voters continue to see Modi as a popular nationalist leader who has accelerated growth and improved foreign ties.
There was no breakdown of respondents to the survey by religion in a country where Muslims make up 14% of the 1.42 billion population.
The poll of 35,801 respondents conducted across India between Dec. 15 and Jan. 28 found Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies could win 335 of the 543 directly elected seats in the lower house of parliament.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance coalition won more than 350 seats in the 2019 election.
