And the winner is...

Yesterday culminated a month of voting in India with the Congress party emerging the winner and their United Progressive Alliance (UPA) maintaining power in the government. This also means that PM Manmohan Singh will serve another 5-year term as the country's Prime Minister. The Indian National Congress is the party of the Nehru-Gandhi family and its leaders have included: Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and now Sonia Gandhi. And many think that Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi's son, Rahul, who is also a member of parliament, will be the party's next big leader.

India's claims the title of the world's largest democracy and with a population of over 1.1 billion, there were over 700 million registered voters in this election. Personally, I find this number of 700 million doubtful because I've also read that nearly 50% of the country's population is under the age of 25. So this means that there are 200 million people between the ages of 18 and 25. While this is possible, I also know that not EVERYONE is registered to vote and I know that there are occurrences of voter fraud where people are registered multiple times. Anyways, back to the election...

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India's political system is extremely fractured with a numerous parties. Although the Congress and the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) are the two major ones, there are a host of smaller parties that are driven by state/region, religion and caste. As a result, the winning party (usually Congress or BJP) is often forced to form a collation government with several of the smaller parties in order to gain control of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament that is directly elected by voters.

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Many of these parties sprout up when a leader breaks away from the Congress or BJP and forms his/her own party or grow to national prominence because of the leader. Lalu Prasad Yadav, the Railway Minister, has his own party, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) that has waning popularity in Bihar, his home state. Mayawati, Chief Minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, heads the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which is very strong in her home state. The party claims to represent the interests of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Mayawati is a Dalit and, had her party done well in the elections, would have been poised to become the first Dalit Prime Minister.

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Voting occurred over the past month in 5 phases throughout the country. Each election day was a mandatory public holiday in those states with voting. I really like this, as it sends a strong message to people that voting is important. Election day, as well as the day preceding the election, is also a dry day, meaning alcohol is not sold in the state. "Votes for liquor" scams are not uncommon and the declaration of dry days is meant to curb this.

After voting, an ink mark is usually placed on the voter's index finger. Without fail, newspapers the next day features photos of politicians and celebrities showing off their ink marks. For some reason, in Bombay, they marked middle fingers, so there were full page spreads of all of the Bollywood stars sticking up their middle fingers. Quite funny if you can here. Here's a photo of the Bachchan family, the royal family of Bollywood, giving the middle finger to the media. I wonder if they secretly got pleasure of out of this?

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And I've added this BJP campaign poster below because I think it's funny. What on earth is he doing??

I've only learned a bit in my time here about the complex political system. One important and interesting topic I haven't touch on is corruption within the system. In this election there were a significant number of candidates with criminal cases pending against them - from all parties. Maybe I will pick this topic up later.