Photo: Collected
Vote counting began in India's election Tuesday, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi all but assured a triumph for his Hindu nationalist drive that has thrown the opposition into disarray and deepened concerns for minority rights.
Exit polls have shown 73-year-old Modi well on track for victory after a six-week-long election that saw 642 million people vote in seven stages across the world's most populous country.
Modi said at the weekend he was confident that "the people of India have voted in record numbers" to re-elect his government, a decade after he first became prime minister.
Observers believe his appeals to growing Hindu nationalist sentiment will give him a third term in power.
Modi's opponents have struggled to counter the campaign juggernaut of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and have been hamstrung by infighting and what they say are politically motivated criminal cases aimed at hobbling challengers.
US think tank Freedom House said this year that the BJP had "increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents".
On Sunday, Arvind Kejriwal, chief minister of the capital Delhi and a key leader in an alliance formed to compete against Modi, returned to jail.
Kejriwal, 55, was detained in March over a long-running corruption probe, but was later released and allowed to campaign as long as he returned to custody once voting ended.
"When power becomes dictatorship, then jail becomes a responsibility," Kejriwal said before surrendering himself, vowing to continue "fighting" from behind bars.
In the lead-up to the election, many of the 200 million-plus Muslim minority grew increasingly uneasy about their futures and their community's place in the constitutionally secular country.
Modi himself made a number of strident comments about Muslims on the campaign trail, referring to them as "infiltrators".
Messenger/Disha
