Indians vote in final leg of key state elections
India's most populous state along with one of its smallest went to the polls Saturday in the last leg of local elections that could influence who rules the world's largest democracy in two years.
Voters in vast northern Uttar Pradesh and tiny coastal Goa cast ballots in the elections seen as an important test of popularity for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's scandal-tainted Congress party-led national government.
Results of the polls staged over five weeks in five states will be announced next Tuesday and analysts are watching to see whether the embattled Congress fares well enough to remain the powerbroker in the 2014 general elections.
The Uttar Pradesh vote is the most important of the five elections which also have been held in the restive state of Manipur, the wheat-bowl heartland of Punjab and the mountainous region of Uttarakhand.
Rahul Gandhi, scion of a family which has dominated post-independence Indian politics, has spearheaded campaigning for the secular left-leaning Congress party in politically crucial Uttar Pradesh.
The 41-year-old is widely viewed as a prime minister-in-waiting, but he faces a hard task in resurrecting Congress's fortunes in a state where the party has been out of power for 22 years and was thrashed in the last elections in 2007.
Arrayed against him in the vast, underdeveloped state of 200 million people is the mercurial Chief Minister Mayawati, a low-caste populist who commands a huge following from those at the bottom of India's strict social ladder.
Gandhi has been accompanied on the hustings by his mother, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and his charismatic sister, Priyanka, who has opted out of seeking office but whose natural affinity with voters makes her a strong campaigner.
Rahul Gandhi has made it his key goal to substantially raise Congress's seat tally from the just 22 out of 403 it won in the last election in Uttar Pradesh.
"If Congress does well in Uttar Pradesh, the clamour for transition (from Singh to Rahul Gandhi) will upgrade into an unmanageable uproar," veteran political commentator M.J. Akbar said.
"It could become almost embarrassing for Prime Minister Singh to continue."
Gandhi has painted Mayawati's government as a corrupt "money-eating elephant" -- an elephant is her party's symbol -- while Mayawati is counting on a booming rural economy to return her to power.
The main contest in Uttar Pradesh is between Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party, another regional caste-based group the Samajwadi Party, Congress and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
Uttar Pradesh will send 80 members to parliament in the next national elections -- the single largest bloc.
Bookies in Uttar Pradesh reported odds were in favour of the opposition Samajwadi Party taking power in the state, backed by Congress and another regional party, according to India's Mail Today newspaper.
A poor performance by Congress could backfire on Gandhi's fortunes as well as on Prime Minister Singh.
Singh's ruling coalition has been assailed by a string of corruption accusations over the cut-rate sale of telecom licences in 2008 to the graft-plagued 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games.