While the Middle East was on high alert this week in the wake of Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel (see below), our cover story looks ahead to India and the commencement of the world’s biggest election.
As the vast process – in which 969 million people are eligible to vote over the course of six weeks – gets under way on Friday, Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan visit the state of Uttarakhand, a mountainous region that has become a testing ground for the BJP’s Hindu nationalist policies and offers a glimpse of what may lie in store for India, should prime minister Narendra Modi win a third successive term, as most polls predict.
