With less than a month left for Indian parliamentary elections to be over, the country’s Election Commission has doubled up its voter participation interventions to overcome a disappointing drop in voter turnout in the first two phases held so far, particularly in big cities.

The turnout so far has been 66.14% in phase 1 and 66.71% in phase 2, which, seen against electoral participation history in India, is among the best but somewhat lags the high benchmarks of previous polls in 2019.
Nearly 970 million voters are eligible to vote in India’s seven-phase Lok Sabha polls.

The opening phase of voting on April 19 covering 102 seats was the largest round and in the second phase, polling was held in 88 constituencies and the third phase of polling is scheduled for tomorrow.

With polling in a total of 190 seats out of the way so far, the EC said it has redoubled efforts to take up all interventions possible to boost voter turnout in the remaining five phases which will cover 353 seats of the total of 543 Lok Sabha seats till June 1. The counting of votes will be taken up on June 4.

What is particularly troubling the EC is the voter apathy and turnout level in some metropolitan cities, including Bengaluru, in the second phase of voting held on April 26, a pointer to the rigid levels of apathy in India’s high-tech city.

Cities in India’s National Capital Region (NCR), including Ghaziabad and Noida, satellite cities of Delhi, have fared no better.  Bengaluru, Ghaziabad and Noida have a decline in turnout number compared to 2019, according to EC sources.

Bengaluru Central and Bengaluru South, which voted in the second phase on April 26, saw turnouts of 54.06% and 53.17% respectively, compared to 54.31% and 53.69% in the last election.

Ghaziabad, which experienced a decrease of 6 percentage points from 55.88% in 2019 to 49.88% this time while Noida recorded 53.63%, down from 60.4% in 2019.

EC officials said that disappointed by the growing apathy among urban voters despite stepped-up efforts to increase awareness about the importance of voter participation, the Commission had last month assembled many metro Commissioners in Delhi to work out a strategy.

An exclusive action plan has been taken up. The Commission hopes the plan will help urban centres going to polls in the next five phases turn the tide.

Following the dip in the turnout in phase one, the Commission had directed state chief electoral officers of Maharashtra, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and Karnataka to come up with an additional set of plans to enhance voter turnout. The Commission also held one-to-one interaction with district electoral officers of low turnout districts (based on 2019 election figures) in phases 3 and 4 to identify ways for increasing the turnout.

Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar, Election Commissioners Gyanesh Kumar and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu are leading a set of additional initiatives for this purpose with Chief Electoral Officers and senior officers at Nirvachan Sadan, the EC’s national headquarters, in New Delhi.

A lower voter turnout so far has caused worries in the BJP camp whose campaign managers are now wondering whether the party and its allies can achieve the landslide victory predicted by opinion polls just a month ago.

The lack of momentum has been partly attributed to indifference among party workers who have been lured into believing that victory is assured. The absence of a wave on a single issue in the first two phases of the have dampened BJP’s hopes of a BJP's aim to secure a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha chamber, or 362 seats.

This, most political analysts say, has prompted Modi to change tack in his campaign speeches after the first phase in a bid to energise the party’s committed support base, and get them out to voting stations. Accordingly, he has shifted focus from the success stories of his governance in his decade-long tenure and bring up divisive issues in the context of targeting opposition Congress.

There is assessment among the political analysts that BJP would have reaped rich electoral gains if the election was in February-March when the euphoria over the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya had peaked. However, that fervour has since then worn off with the passage of time. But less than a month of campaign time is left and there is room for twists and turns that may alter the course of the election.
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The writer is a veteran Indian journalist