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MUMBAI: India's marathon general election passes the half-way stage Thursday, with Mumbai entering the fray barely five months on from the deadly Islamist militant attacks on the city.
Ten seats in India's lower house of parliament are up for grabs in India's financial and entertainment capital, which has seen an increase in "white collar" political activism since the November strikes that killed 166.
Anger at India's leaders for failing to prevent the carnage has led independent candidates to stand and stirred the traditionally apathetic educated, urban middle class to take part in the political process.
Yet despite the awakening, national security is not considered a priority issue across the country as a whole, with the vast majority of voters more concerned with local issues that impact their daily lives.
“The belief that the 26/11 (November 26) attacks on Mumbai and India will somehow change the character of voting is quite wrong. It's exaggerated," said the editor of the city's Loksatta newspaper, Kumar Ketkar.
"Terrorism is not uppermost in the minds of the majority of voters," he told AFP.
Politics professor Balveer Arora, from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, agreed.
"There's no wave of nationalism in these elections, despite 26/11," he said.
Instead, what Ketkar called traditional "identitarian politics" - how much a voter identifies with a candidate and party - plus long-standing concerns about living conditions, caste or religion will again play a bigger role.
In Mumbai and Maharashtra state, that has meant support for right-wing Hindu parties like Shiv Sena and its offshoot the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, which both push a strong line on protecting local Marathi culture and language.
Among the 11 states voting on Thursday are parts of impoverished Bihar and populous Uttar Pradesh in the north, Gujarat in the west, the southern rural state of Karnataka, and leftist-dominated eastern West Bengal.
Smaller, regional parties are expected to play a key role in the election, after securing nearly 50 per cent of the vote in 2004 and forcing the ruling Congress party into a coalition with an alphabet soup of local parties.
"One of the things to look for in this election is whether the state parties will go any further," said Arora.
In Uttar Pradesh, which sends the most number of lawmakers to parliament, all eyes are on two powerful caste-based parties - one of them led by the populist firebrand, Mayawati Kumari.
Mayawati, dubbed the "queen" of India's lowest caste, the Dalits, is widely seen as the kingmaker for the next administration in New Delhi and could even emerge as prime minister of a "third front" grouping of leftist parties.
With 714 million eligible voters, India's general election is the world's biggest democratic exercise. The first of five phases of voting started on April 16 and the last will be held on May 13. Results are expected three days later.
With so much support going to regional parties, there is no chance of either the incumbent Congress party-led alliance or the bloc led by its main rival, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) securing an absolute majority of the 543 elected seats in parliament.
Who actually ends up governing India's 1.1 billion people will be decided in what observers are calling the election's "sixth phase" - a period of intense political horse-trading that will follow the expected fractured result.
Voting in Gujarat was given an extra touch of tension on Monday when India's Supreme Court ordered an inquiry into the role played by the state's chief minister, Narendra Modi, in anti-Muslim riots that swept the state in 2002.
Modi has been widely touted as a successor to the BJP's ageing leader L.K. Advani, and the new probe is embarrassing for the party which has been trying to defend itself against Congress campaign charges that it promotes communal divisions.
The allegation of complicity in the riots has dogged Modi for years and tainted his success in turning Gujarat into an economic powerhouse.
- AFP/yb
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