Article on general election 2019
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The 2019 Indian general election is currently being held in seven phases from 11 April to 19 May 2019 to constitute the 17th Lok Sabha. The counting of votes will be conducted on 23 May, and on the same day the results will be declared. About 900 million Indian citizens are eligible to vote in one of the seven phases depending on the region.
All 543 elected MPs will be elected from single-member constituencies using first-past-the-post voting. The President of India nominates an additional two members from the Anglo-Indian community if he believes the community is under-represented.
More than 50 parties are contesting these elections. Most of them are small with regional appeal. The main parties are the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC). With the exception of 2014, no single party has won the majority of seats in the Lok sabha since 1984, and therefore forming alliances is the norm in Indian elections. In the 2019 general election, there are four main national pre-poll alliances. They are the NDA headed by the BJP, the UPA headed by the INC, the grand alliance of regional parties, and the left front of Communist-leaning parties. Given the volatile nature of coalition politics in India, alliances may change during and after the election. 2019 General Election is the first time when BJP is contesting more seats than Congress in the Lok Sabha elections.
The INC has not formed alliance in states where it is in direct contest with the BJP. These states include Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. It has formed alliances with regional parties in Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Jharkhand, and Kerala. The party has not been able to form alliance with other parties in Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Northeast, Delhi, Punjab, Haryana and Goa.
Early in the campaign in January 2019, Mayawati (president of the Bahujan Samaj Party) and Akhilesh Yadav (president of the Samajwadi Party) announced an alliance to contest 76 seats out of the 80 in Uttar Pradesh and the alliance will not fight in four seats, namely Amethi and Rae Bareli which they left for Congress and another two for other political parties. The alliance did not include Congress, with Mayawati stating, "Including Congress in the alliance will hurt SP-BSP prospects as Congress's votes do not get transferred" and "the policies of both these parties [BJP and Congress] have been mostly the same". The alliance was the second of its kind with a similar coalition formed 25 years ago in 1993.