Milan Vaishnav and Caroline Mallory
Indians will vote in general elections in April–May 2024, for the first time in five years.
The 2024 election will be the largest democratic exercise in history. India has the most expensive elections in the world, surpassing even the United States. In 2019, parties and candidates spent an estimated $8.7 billion to woo more than 900 million eligible voters.
In 2019, 8,054 candidates representing 673 parties stood for elections for a shot at becoming a Member of Parliament (MP).
Nearly 615 million people—67.4 percent of Indians—voted in 2019: this was the highest voter turnout on record. For the first time in history, the persistent gender gap between male and female turnout disappeared.
As of January 1, 2023, there were over 945 million registered voters in India.
What’s at stake?
The 2024 general elections will decide who gets to sit in India’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha or House of the People.
It is the more powerful of the two houses that make up India’s parliament:
- It can hold the government accountable by introducing and passing no confidence motions.
- It is in charge of the purse strings: all tax, borrowing, and spending bills only require the approval of the lower house.
- It has more seats than the upper house (543, compared to a maximum of 250 for the latter), giving it greater heft in legislative negotiations.
The party or coalition that attains a Lok Sabha majority will nominate one of their elected members to serve as prime minister. The prime minister will be entrusted with selecting ministers to serve in the cabinet. In India’s parliamentary system, there are no term limits.
Mind-boggling logistics
India’s electoral rules say there must be a polling station within 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) of every habitation.
This means many of India’s 11 million election workers must trek across glaciers, deserts, jungles, and an ocean to make sure every eligible Indian can vote.
For instance, the sole inhabitant of the remote Gir National Park in Gujarat, home to the last free-ranging Asiatic lions, has his own polling station complete with his own electronic voting machine, because there are no paper ballots for in-person voting.
Nearly every vote is cast electronically, via 1.74 million electronic voting machines across more than 1 million polling stations (as of 2019).
Timeline
Making sure that over 900 million people can vote securely is difficult to do in a single day, so the general elections take place over several weeks.
There is no single date when everyone votes. Instead, the country votes in sequential phases by region. In 2019, elections transpired over seven phases between April 11 and May 19, with all the votes counted on May 23. The first phase of the election will take place in a specified set of geographic regions with subsequent phases gradually moving across the country to cover other regions.
There are no primary elections. Party leaders have complete control over the nomination of candidates. If candidates fail to win party backing, they can run as independents but are unlikely to do well. Of the 543 MPs elected in 2019, only 4 were independent candidates.
The number of candidates contesting elections in each electoral constituency varies widely. In 2019, the Nizamabad constituency of Telangana saw 185 contestants throw their hat in the ring, while only 3 candidates were in the fray in the Tura constituency in Meghalaya.
Voters can officially cast “protest” votes. Since 2013, voters have been able to select a “none of the above” (NOTA) option if they want to exercise the right to vote but do not wish to support any of the candidates on offer. In 2019, NOTA earned just over 1 percent of the total vote. However, NOTA is not considered an effective protest vote because even if NOTA gets the most votes, it does not trigger a repoll. Rather, the individual candidate with the second-most votes (after NOTA) would be declared the winner.
This year’s campaign is expected to run over many weeks in April–May 2024, with the exact electoral calendar to be announced in March.
WEEK 1
The Election Commission of India announces election dates. This triggers the Model Code of Conduct, a set of norms designed to discourage hate speech, vote-buying, and preelection spending.
WEEK 2
The Election Commission of India formally notifies the elections.
WEEK 3
Candidates contesting the first phase of elections submit their nomination papers to the Election Commission.
WEEK 4
Official campaigning kicks off for the first phase.
WEEK 6
Polling starts for the first phase. The process repeats on a staggered basis for the subsequent phases until the entire country has been covered.
WEEK 10
Votes counted. The votes for all phases are announced and the results are usually known within hours.
The Players
The incumbent
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi won 303 seats in 2019. Overall, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won a total of 352 seats, giving it a commanding majority. Preelection surveys suggest that, if elections were held today, the NDA would once more win a clear majority of seats in the Lok Sabha.
The principal challenger
The Indian National Congress (INC, also known as the Congress Party), headed by Mallikarjun Kharge, is the BJP’s only pan-Indian rival. The Congress Party has suffered two consecutive disastrous election performances, winning just 44 seats in 2014 and 52 seats in 2019.
The question mark
In July 2023, more than two dozen opposition parties announced their intention to form an electoral alliance, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), to wrest power from the NDA. INDIA, of which the Congress Party is the largest constituent member, includes a wide diversity of parties, from the All India Trinamool Congress (the ruling party in the state of West Bengal) and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (the ruling party in Tamil Nadu) to smaller parties like the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation and the Indian Union Muslim League. In the run-up to the election, INDIA has been besieged by infighting and defections.
Electoral Map
Seats are divided among states in proportion to their population: more people mean more seats.
Roughly 25 percent of seats are constitutionally reserved for members hailing from one of two disadvantaged communities: Scheduled Castes (SC), also known as Dalits, and Scheduled Tribes (ST), India’s tribal peoples or Adivasis. Eighty-four seats are reserved for SCs and forty-seven seats are reserved for STs. In these constituencies, only candidates from the protected groups can contest elections, though all eligible adults can cast their votes.
Although India’s parliament recently passed a new measure to reserve one-third of legislative seats for women, the implementation of this act has been delayed until after 2024.
The candidate who secures the greatest number of votes in each electoral constituency wins that seat. Candidates do not need to earn a majority of the vote to be declared the victor.
Battleground states
There are many battleground states this year, but three deserve special mention.
UTTAR PRADESH 80 SEATS
Home to an estimated 230 million Indians, Uttar Pradesh is the single biggest electoral prize. In 2019, the BJP and a smaller coalition ally swept up 64 of the state’s seats, while two powerful regional parties—the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party—could only muster a disappointing 15 seats.
MAHARASHTRA 48 SEATS
In 2019, the BJP and its ally Shiv Sena won 23 and 18 seats, respectively. Since then, Shiv Sena has split: one faction allied with the BJP to form the state government, and another—led by former state chief minister Uddhav Thackeray—joined hands with the Congress Party and the Nationalist Congress Party.
KARNATAKA28 SEATS
The BJP nearly swept the southern state in 2019, winning 25 of the state’s seats (with a BJP-backed independent candidate winning a twenty-sixth seat). Replicating this feat will be an uphill battle as the Congress Party wrested control of the state from the BJP in 2023 regional polls. However, in September 2023, an influential regional front known as the Janata Dal (Secular), which has often played the role of kingmaker, officially joined the BJP-led NDA.
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