On April 11, the first of 900 million people visited polling stations in India to cast votes for a new government. India’s electoral machinery is too vast to conduct polls in a single day, as many democracies do. Instead, voters in the 29 states cast their votes across seven phases spread across several weeks. As this article went to press, voting was still under way. If opinion polls are to be believed, parliament may well be hung – a blow to the current government, led by the Bharatiya Janata