Modi votes in home state as mammoth India election hits half-way mark

Millions vote across 93 constituencies in third phase as the prime minister mounts an increasingly shrill campaign, ramping up polarising rhetoric.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among millions of voters across 93 constituencies that went to polls in the third phase of India’s mammoth general election.

The world’s most populous nation began voting on April 19 in a seven-phase election in which nearly one billion people are eligible to vote, with ballots set to be counted on June 4.

Tuesday’s polling covered 93 seats in 11 states and union territories, with Gujarat and Maharashtra in the west and Karnataka in the south accounting for 50 seats. That completed voting for 283 of 543 seats for the Lok Sabha, as the lower house of Indian parliament is called.

Modi, 73, is seeking a rare, third straight term in a vote which pits his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against an alliance of more than two dozen opposition parties, led by the Indian National Congress.

Modi cast his ballot in home state of Gujarat’s Gandhinagar constituency where his number two, Home Minister Amit Shah, is the BJP candidate.

He urged citizens to actively participate in the “festival of democracy”, while taking care of their health as summer temperatures continued to rise in many parts of the country.

Clad in saffron and white, he was surrounded by hundreds of supporters and party members, signing autographs and talking to children on the way to the polling station.

Modi changed his campaign strategy after the first phase of voting and focused more on firing up BJP’s Hindu base by attacking rivals as pro-Muslim, even as a survey said jobs and inflation were the main concerns of voters.

In his public speeches, he referred to Muslims