Election Commission to announce Lok Sabha polls schedule: Will ECI trim the number of phases?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has communicated to his ministers that governance and decision making does not stop during elections

Updated on: Mar 16, 2024, 09:59:34 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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The 2019 general elections were held in seven phases from April 11 to May 19 with the results for members of the 17th Lok Sabha declared on May 23, 2019.

Will the EC help in cutting down the number of election phases for the country to go on about its business rather than remain mired in election?

Today, the Election Commission is scheduled to announce general elections to elect members for the 18th Lok Sabha. The million dollar question is whether the EC will reduce the number of phases of polling or continue with a similar number of phases as in 2019.

While state police and paramilitary forces are required to protect the electorate from violence and electoral coercion, the internal security environment in the country is much better than 2019 with Jammu and Kashmir coming to terms with abrogation of Article 370 and Maoist insurgency limited to Bastar region in Chhattisgarh.

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Apart from political violence in West Bengal and ethnic tensions among Kukuis and Meiteis in Manipur, the internal security situation is largely stable albeit religious radicalisation is high among the minority communities.

With terror incidents going down in the hinterland apart from terror strikes in Rajouri-Poonch sector since 2019, the EC has an opportunity to reduce the number of phases rather than a month long tedious exercise costing a humongous amount of money, men, women and material.

But there is a caveat to this presumption as forces need time to move from one end of the country to the other and EC rather play it safe than reduce the number of phases as political violence and terror strikes are a distinct possibility during the elections.

In the age of deep fake AI, India’s adversaries including big powers could also use this opportunity to influence the electorate towards the party they think could further their cause.

Then there are others like the Pakistani deep state who could activate their sleeper cells to engineer violence or cyberattacks during elections. Since 2019, India has seen consistent cyberattacks originating from China and East European countries but the focus has been to cripple governance in India.

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi communicating to his Ministers that governance and decision making does not stop during elections, the present government will take decisions till the last day of its term. Will the EC help in cutting down the number of election phases for the country to go on about its business rather than remain mired in election and politics for a whole month ?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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