India calls elections for April-May

India Sunday announced a general election to be held over nearly six weeks starting on April 11, when hundreds of millions of voters will cast ballots in the world's second-most populous nation.

From April 11 to May 19 voters will elect 543 lawmakers to India's lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, which governs the Asian nation of 1.25 billion people from the capital New Delhi, the electoral commission said Sunday.

About 900 million voters would be eligible for the polls, about 15 million between the ages of 18 and 19 years. Votes will be counted on May 23, said Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora.

Election staff checks Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines and Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) ahead of India's general election at a warehouse in Ahmedabad, India, March 6, 2019. /VCG Photo

Arora also said an election commission team had visited the state to speak to stakeholders and has decided to appoint three special observers to the region to monitor the polling.

He said assembly elections that are due to be held in the state, where the assembly was dissolved last year, won't take place simultaneously with the general election.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (C) gestures along with Indian Chief Minister of the state of Tamil Nadu Edappadi Palanisamy (R), Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) founder S. Ramadoss (R) and other party leaders during a National Democratic Alliance (NDA) rally in Chennai, India, March 6, 2019. /VCG Photo

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rahul Gandhi's Indian National Congress are the two strongest challengers among hundreds of political parties from across the culturally and geographically diverse country.

Modi, 68, won an outright majority in the 2014 elections, he enters the race in a strong position while Gandhi, aged 48, comes from India's most famous family.

(Cover: India's Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora gestures while speaking to the media during a news conference in New Delhi, India, March 10, 2019. /Reuters Photo)