Modi favorite as giant election starts

Polls opened on Thursday in the first phase of India's general elections, seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, as the scion of the Gandhi family told Indians that the country's "soul" was at stake.

Opinion polls put Modi as the favorite to win, but he faces a possible backlash from India's 900 million voters over unemployment and rural poverty, Agence France-Presse reported.

Because of India's vastness, Thursday marked just the first of seven phases in the election to take place from the tea plantations of Darjeeling to the slums of Mumbai to the tropical Andaman Islands, and everywhere in between.

Security forces were on high alert due to the perennial danger of violence at election time.

Thousands of parties and candidates will run for office between now and May 19 in 543 constituencies across the nation of 1.3 billion people, with results not due until May 23.

Some of the 1.1 million electronic voting machines will be transported through jungles and carried up mountains.

Phase one on Thursday anticipated as many as 142 million people might cast ballots.

In Assam in the northeast, queues started forming 45 minutes before voting began. Voters included many young people－there are 84 million first-time voters in this election－who were visibly excited.

"It's a great feeling to cast the vote, which makes me a part of the democratic system and makes me responsible for electing a good leader who can run the country," Anurag Baruah, 23, told AFP.

'Good days'

Modi appealed in an early-morning tweet to his almost 47 million followers on voters to "turn out in record numbers and exercise their franchise".

His supporters say the tea seller's son from Gujarat state has improved the nation's standing. But critics say his party's Hindu nationalism has aggravated religious tensions in India, Associated Press reported.

Modi and his right-wing BJP swept to power in 2014 with their famous promise of achhe din (good days), becoming the first party to win an absolute majority in 30 years.

Modi has simplified the tax code and made doing business easier, but some of his promises have fallen short, particularly in rural areas.

Growth in Asia's third-biggest economy has been too slow to provide jobs for the roughly one million Indians entering the labor market each month, and unemployment is reportedly at its highest since the 1970s.

The president of the Indian National Congress party, Rahul Gandhi, 48, hopes to become the latest prime minister from his family－and aided by sister Priyanka as general secretary of the Congress－has accused Modi of causing a "national disaster".

The Congress party appeared in December to profit from voter dissatisfaction, winning three key state elections and chipping into the BJP's Hindi-speaking northern heartland.

"I want a government that thinks about women and brings down the high prices of rice and lentils," Suman Sharman, 50, a housewife in Ghaziabad, told AFP.

"Cooking gas prices have gone up, sending children to school is expensive. It's difficult to run the household. I want the new government to think about middle classes," she said.