NEW DELHI—A total 642 million Indians voted in the just-concluded six-week-long polls, chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar told reporters on Monday, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi widely expected to win a third term.
“We have created a world record of 642 million Indian voters, it is a historic moment for all of us,” Kumar said, adding nearly half of those—312 million—were women voters.
“It shows the incredible power of voters of India,” he said.
“People should know about the strength of Indian democracy.”
Based on the commission’s figure of an electorate of 968 million, 66.3 percent of eligible voters turned out, slightly down on the last general election in 2019.
Kumar said that “642 million voters chose action over apathy, belief over cynicism and in some cases, the ballot over the bullet”, the commission said, with the commissioner adding that there were “no major incidents of violence”.
Voting in the seventh and final staggered round ended on Saturday, and counting and results are due on Tuesday.
Exit polls show Modi is well on track to triumph, with the premier saying he was confident that “the people of India have voted in record numbers” to re-elect his government.
India uses electronic voting machines that allow for faster counting of ballots.
“We have a robust counting process in place,” Kumar said.
Raqib Hameed Naik, from the US-based India Hate Lab, said they had “witnessed an unprecedented scale of disinformation” in the elections.
“Conspiracy theories… were vigorously promoted to deepen the communal divide,” said Naik, whose organization researches hate speech and disinformation.
With seven stages of voting stretched over six weeks, AFP factcheckers carried out 40 election-related debunks across India’s political divide.
There were fake videos of Bollywood stars endorsing the opposition, as well as those purporting to show one person casting multiple votes.
Some were crude or poked fun.
Others were far more sinister and sophisticated productions aimed to deliberately mislead.
All were widely shared.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came under fire for posts stoking sectarian tensions with India’s minority Muslim community of more than 200 million.
These included numerous videos, matching incendiary campaign speeches by Modi, falsely claiming his opponents were planning to redistribute India’s wealth in favour of Muslims.
Naik said such posts “aimed at stoking fear and animosity towards Muslims to polarise voters along religious lines.”
“The ruling party’s strategy of exploiting religious sentiments for electoral gain has not only undermined the integrity of the democratic process but also sowed dangerous seeds of division and hatred in society,” he said.
False information was detected across the political spectrum but the leader of the opposition Congress party, Rahul Gandhi, was one of the leading targets.
His statements, videos and photographs were shared on social media, but often incompletely or out of context.
One digitally altered video analyzed by AFP used Gandhi’s real boast that the opposition alliance would triumph, but flipped it to say Modi would win a third term when the result is declared on Tuesday.
Others purported to show Gandhi falsely appealing to people to vote for Modi.
Among the more egregious examples were those falsely linking him to India’s rival neighbors, Pakistan and China.
Those included a photograph that claimed Gandhi was waving the “Chinese constitution” during an election rally. It was in fact that of India.
Other posts portrayed Gandhi, a Hindu, as being against India’s majority religion, capitalizing on Modi’s efforts to cast himself as the country’s most staunch defender of the faith.
One video of a ruined Hindu temple, a real image from Pakistan, was widely shared.
However, the post falsely claimed it was from Gandhi’s constituency and that he was responsible for its destruction.
Another manipulated video falsely showed him refusing to accept a statue of a Hindu god.
One more claimed he was paying young people to support him on social media, when in reality he was talking about youth unemployment.
They were all widely shared by BJP supporters.
