NEW DELHI: Around 130 million young adults aged 18 to 22 will be newly eligible to vote in India’s national elections when polls open on Friday (Apr 19) – more people than the entire population of Mexico.
AFP asked four first-time voters who were too young to vote in the 2019 elections about who they would support and the issues that mattered to them:
THE STUDENT
Mumbai university student Abhishek Dhotre, 22, said he was unhappy with “the communal discord that is seen all throughout India” as a result of the government’s muscular Hindu nationalism.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has brought India’s majority Hindu faith to the forefront of political life.
That has left Muslims and other minorities anxious about their futures in the nominally secular country.
Still, with India’s economy growing at a breakneck pace, overtaking former colonial ruler Britain as the world’s fifth-largest in 2022, Dhotre wants Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to win again.
“With the flow of development, infrastructure and everything that’s going on, I would prefer the current government to stay,” he told AFP.
