More jobs please, say voters as Indian elections loom

Seventy-nine per cent of Indians, most of them Hindus, believe that “India belongs to all religions equally, not just Hindus”. That’s the most headlined finding of a recent pre-poll study of the world’s largest electorate in the run-up to

India’s general election that gets under way on April 19,

in which close to one billion people will cast their votes.

In the decade since the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office, religion has been widely perceived as having played an outsized role in Indian politics, culminating in the much-publicised inauguration in January of a

grand temple to the Hindu deity Ram in the town of Ayodhya.

The event was presided over by none other than Mr Modi himself. India’s ruling coalition, led by the popular Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is commonly described as a “Hindu nationalist government”. But perhaps to the surprise of many observers, the country’s Hindu identity is not top of mind among its voters. Rather, it is bread-and-butter issues that matter most.