India election 2024 updates: 49 seats vote in Phase 5 of Lok Sabha polls

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To read more about the fifth phase of India’s mammoth national election, you can access our explainer here. The sixth phase of the seven-phase election will be held on Saturday.

Please check our India election page for all the latest news and analyses.

We will be closing this live page soon. Here is a recap of today’s events:

• As of 5pm (11:30 GMT), the Himalayan territory of Ladakh is leading with the highest voter turnout at 67 percent in the fifth phase of the Indian elections, the ANI news agency reports.
• Opposition Indian National Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi, who is contesting from Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh state, says it has “become clear in the first four phases that the people have stood up to protect the constitution and democracy”.
• Police have detained a 17-year-old whose video shows him voting for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) eight times. The video has gone viral as rivals have screamed voter fraud.
• Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the BJP has urged women and young voters to “exercise their franchise”.

India’s six-week-long general election is entering its final stages with the fifth phase of voting held today.

Among the regions going to the polls was Ladakh, which shares a border with China and Pakistan. It’s seen months of protests calling for statehood.

Watch our video report below:

A growing number of Indians are bearing the brunt of the increasing informalisation of work.

The India Employment Report 2024, a study released in March by the International Labour Organization and the Institute for Human Development, found that India’s workforce is getting more informalised and the quality of employment has suffered, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

About 70 percent of India’s construction workers and 62 percent of its casual agricultural workers earn salaries below minimum wage, the study said, citing government data. Even in the formal sector, about 18 percent of workers did not have work contracts that protect them. They also had fewer benefits than before, the study found.

Read more here.

Weather officials had warned of more heatwave days than usual – even in a place like Mumbai, India’s financial capital, in western India.

Voters at a polling station in a tiny lane in the city waited for hours in snaking queues that advanced slowly. “It is claustrophobic, and people are falling sick,” said housewife Shalini Pawar, 42, who queued for three hours.

One woman nearly fainted in the heat, she added, calling for the authorities to provide drinking water to those waiting.

On April 22, the Election Commission of India set up a task force to review the impact of heatwaves and humidity on the elections.

As of 3pm (09:30 GMT), the Himalayan territory of Ladakh was leading with the highest voter turnout at 61.26 percent, the ANI news agency reports.

The western state of Maharashtra was still in last place with a 38.77 percent turnout. The overall turnout at 1pm (07:30 GMT) stood at 47.53 percent, the agency said.

47.53 pc voter turnout recorded till 3 pm in phase 5 Lok Sabha polls, Ladakh leads with 61.26 pc turnout

Read @ANI Story | https://t.co/GrgbcQSkSs#Loksabhaelection2024 #Ladakh #ECI pic.twitter.com/MIAkKrMnGl

— ANI Digital (@ani_digital) May 20, 2024

Police have detained a 17-year-old boy whose video showing him voting for the BJP eight times has gone viral as rivals scream voter fraud.

“This is the second vote,” the boy says, smiling into his phone’s camera after pressing the electronic voting machine button for a BJP candidate in Farrukhabad, about 190km (120 miles) west of Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and a political bellwether.

“Now look! This is my third vote. … Have now voted five times already, now going for the sixth time,” he adds with a finger-count gesture after every press before finally stopping after the eighth time.

The minimum voting age in India is 18.

“We have detained the juvenile, and prima facie he has verified what was visible to all in the viral video,” Deputy Superintendent Dhananjay Singh Kushwaha told the AFP news agency. “He told us that he voted eight times and made the video.”

Electoral officials said all polling officials at the voting station have been suspended.

For years, most people in Indian-administered Kashmir have boycotted elections, which many here have seen as attempts by New Delhi to legitimise – using democracy – its control over a region that has been a hotbed of armed rebellion against India since 1989.

Yet, as India votes in its national elections, that voting pattern is changing. The Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley’s three seats have been given three different dates for voting. Srinagar saw a 38 percent turnout – the highest since 1989.

That is no endorsement of India or its policies, voters and local politicians say. Instead, they say, it is a reflection of a dramatically changed political landscape in the region that they feel has left them with no other option to show their dissent against New Delhi.

You can read more of this story here.

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Buddhists and Muslims in the Himalayan territory are demanding statehood and protections for their local culture. Residents have long demanded a legislature of their own, constitutional protection of the local culture and measures to defend the region’s fragile environment.

“We need protection,” Buddhist monk Stanzin Norphel, 74, said after casting his vote. “This government has destroyed Ladakh.”

Modi’s government split Ladakh off from Indian-administered Kashmir when it revoked the region’s semiautonomy in 2019 and made them both union territories, imposing direct rule from New Delhi. Buddhists in the high-altitude region had then celebrated, anticipating they would soon enjoy greater rights.

However, the federal government has yet to fulfil its promise to include Ladakh in the Sixth Schedule of India’s Constitution, which allows Indigenous tribal people to make their own laws and policies.

Umila Bano, 59, who is Muslim, said she voted for a candidate “who I think will actually work for getting us included in the Sixth Schedule”. “Ladakh needs it,” she told the AFP news agency in Leh.

As the BJP faces voter fatigue and some resistance from a resurgent opposition, foot soldiers of the party’s far-right ideological mentor, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have stepped in to help regain momentum, insiders say.

RSS volunteers are hosting neighbourhood meetings in their homes to persuade people to go out and vote, said Ritesh Agarwal, the senior publicity official for the group in the New Delhi region.

“The decline in voting has been a cause of concern in recent weeks and we have been working to bring a shift in the numbers,” said RSS official Rajiv Tuli. “Meetings, outreach campaigns and even a renewed push to remind voters about ensuring a full-majority government comes to power did become critical after the first phase of voting.”

BJP spokespeople said they were aware the RSS is working to help improve voter turnout but declined comment on how this would affect the party.

“I don’t think there is any sense that BJP is in a weak position,” said Shehzad Poonawalla, adding that a low turnout affected all parties and that voter numbers had increased after the first two phases.

As India elects a new government, jobs have emerged as a key issue. A pre-poll survey by the New Delhi-based Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) found that rising unemployment was foremost on the minds of voters.

Millions of Indians are underemployed and in pitifully low-paying jobs they are overqualified for. Their education often counts for little.

Instead, they face gnawing questions from friends and family, questions that do not augur well for a country with the world’s largest youth population: If this is what education provides, are young people better off without it?

Read more of this story here.

As of 1pm (07:30 GMT), the Himalayan territory of Ladakh was leading with the highest voter turnout at 52.02 percent, the ANI news agency reports.

The western state of Maharashtra was still in last place with a 27.78 percent turnout. The overall turnout till 1pm stood at 36.73 percent, said the agency.

36.73 % voter turn out recorded in phase 5 till 1 pm, Ladakh leads with 52.02% turnout

Read @ANI Story | https://t.co/XiDYw1FlYc#ECI #LokSabhaElection2024 pic.twitter.com/tAut2eP4Zx

— ANI Digital (@ani_digital) May 20, 2024

Pakistan’s former information minister, Fawad Chaudhry, says he did not realise that a three-word post on social media platform X on May 1 would inject his country into a heated conversation it had otherwise skirted until then: India’s noisy election campaign.

“Rahul on fire”, he wrote, reposting a video clip of Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, in which he could be seen criticising Modi’s BJP.

Chaudhry’s post, which came amid India’s massive election, immediately went viral, racking up more than 1.8 million views. It was retweeted 1,800 times and received some 1,500 replies.

Since then, Pakistan has repeatedly figured in speeches of Modi and senior BJP leaders like Home Minister Amit Shah as a battering ram with which to both target the opposition and demonstrate the government’s muscular response during tensions with India’s western neighbour.

That increased emphasis on Pakistan contrasts sharply with the months of campaigning that preceded May, when relations between the neighbours were virtually nonexistent as an election theme.

You can read more of this story here.

Battle lines are sharply drawn in Amethi, which the Congress wants to wrest from Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani.

In 2019, Irani defeated Rahul Gandhi in a seat his family held continuously for the last four decades. This year, the Congress has fielded a longtime loyalist of the Gandhi family, Kishori Lal Sharma, to take on the BJP leader.