Nationalist fervour is likely to secure a second term for Narendra Modi

THE SCALE of an Indian general election can be hard to grasp. With close to 900m registered voters and 1m polling stations, it is as if every country in the European Union, plus America, Canada and Mexico, as well as Japan and South Korea, were all to vote together. Yet the process generally runs smoothly. The voting this time started on April 11th and is divided into seven phases, to reduce the burden on election personnel and police. The use of nearly 4m portable, battery-operated voting machines will make it possible to tally all the votes on a single day, May 23rd.

The counting may run with symphonic precision, but the rest of the proceedings are pure cacophony. With 8,000 candidates from more than 2,000 parties vying for seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, this is less a national election than 543 separate battles. Rules on election spending are loose and often flouted. Estimates of the cost of this year’s contest are as high as $10bn. Since mid-March the Election Commission has seized some $500m of cash, gold, drugs and alcohol it suspects were intended for bribing voters.