Bollywood celebrities vote in the Indian election

The six-week national elections continued on Monday, and many members of Mumbai’s corporate and entertainment elite voiced their support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mumbai is known as the financial capital of India.

When the polls close early next month, it is widely anticipated that the 73-year-old leader would win a third term, mostly because of his tenacious support of India’s predominant Hindu religion. Large corporations have given Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a political war chest that outweighs that of its opponents, and Bollywood celebrities have supported the party’s ideological commitment to bringing the nation’s politics and majority religion closer together.

Support from Bollywood and elite

Modi’s sustained popularity with the general public is not due to the economy, which is still characterized by high unemployment and income disparity, but rather to his carefully crafted image as a champion of the Hindu faith. This year, he oversaw the opening of a massive temple dedicated to the god Ram in the town of Ayodhya. The temple was constructed on the site of a centuries-old mosque that was destroyed in 1992 by radical Hindus. The building of the temple satisfied a long-standing demand of Hindu campaigners, and it was extensively observed with street celebrations and consecutive television coverage around the nation.

Hundreds of notable Indians attended the ceremony, including Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in Asia, whose family gave $300,000 to the temple’s trust. Sachin Tendulkar, a cricket player and resident of Mumbai, was also in attendance, as was actor Amitabh Bachchan, the most well-known product of Bollywood, the name given to the financial centre’s film sector.

After Modi won election to the government ten years ago, a number of movie stars have made a name for themselves as outspoken supporters of his leadership. In keeping with the ruling party’s sectarian rhetoric, filmmakers have also created a number of inflammatory and ideologically laden films, which opponents claim purposefully denigrate India’s Muslim minority, which numbers more than 200 million. The Kerala Story from the previous year, which was strongly backed by the BJP, was widely criticized for making the untrue assertion that hundreds of Hindu women had been indoctrinated by Muslims to join the Islamic State group.

Smriti Irani, a former soap opera star who is now one of the government’s most well-known ministers, defeated India’s most well-known opposition figure, Rahul Gandhi, in the 2019 election to take her current parliamentary seat.

Data released this year revealed that, since electoral bonds were declared unlawful by India’s highest court, the BJP was by far the largest recipient of these controversial political donation vehicles. Prominent corporations and affluent individuals donated $730 million to the party, which makes up little less than half of all contributions made under the program over the previous five years.

Because Modi’s government meets the needs of India’s “existing oligarchic business elite,” conglomerate owners back him, according to Deepanshu Mohan of OP Jindal Global University, who spoke to AFP. He claimed that other factors that have contributed to Modi’s popularity among business giants include lower corporate tax rates, fewer red tape, and a decline in “municipal regulatory corruption.”

At a polling place in a posh neighborhood of Mumbai, N Chandrasekaran, the chairman of Tata Sons, a vast Indian conglomerate with interests in everything from software and cars to tea and salt, cast his ballot. “The ability to cast a ballot is a wonderful privilege,” he said to reporters. “And I would like to ask everyone who lives in Mumbai to come out and vote today.”

In order to reduce the enormous logistical strain of organizing the democratic exercise in the most populous country in the world, India conducts its election in seven parts over a period of six weeks. The fifth cycle is underway while portions of India experience their second heatwave in three weeks following an April that saw extremely high temperatures across the continent. The previous national vote conducted in 2019 had a significantly lower turnout. Analysts attribute this decline to both the general anticipation of a Modi victory and the unusually high temperatures that are expected to accompany the Indian summer.

Tens of millions of voters are casting ballots in the heatwave-affected states of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand, where Monday’s high is predicted to be 40 degrees Celsius. According to scientific studies, heatwaves are become longer, more frequent, and more violent due to climate change, with Asia warming more quickly than the rest of the world. The Indian election involves about 968 million eligible voters; the results are anticipated to be announced three days after the final round of polling on June 1.