India election more than halfway through, Kashmir valley votes in Phase 4

Kashmir voters are expected to show their discontent with Modi’s cancellation of the region’s special status and security crackdown that followed in 2019.

Millions of Indians across 96 constituencies have cast their ballots as the country’s gigantic, six-week-long election edges past its halfway mark.

Monday’s polling in the fourth round of election across nine states and one union territory is pivotal for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeking a third straight term but facing the voters’ fury over unemployment and inflation.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies are pitted against an alliance of more than two dozen opposition parties, including the main rival Indian National Congress party.

The world’s most populous nation began voting on April 19 in the seven-phase elections in which nearly one billion people are eligible to elect 543 members of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament. The ballots will be counted on June 4.

The vote on Monday for 96 parliament seats largely covered the southern and eastern states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, where the BJP is not as strong as in the country’s north and west.

Some seats in BJP strongholds in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh states also went to the polls on Monday, while crucial seats in Maharashtra and Bihar states, where the right-wing party governs in alliances with regional parties, were also up for grabs in the fourth phase.

With the fourth phase vote, the fate of 379 out of 543 constituencies has been sealed.

Srinagar, the main city in the Indian-administered Kashmir, also voted for the first time since Modi’s 2019 decision to remove the region’s semiautonomy.

According to analysts, the BJP is not contesting there as