In India’s Hindu holy city of Varanasi, where a week of unbearable temperatures has brought daily life to a standstill, crowds lined up early outside polling booths to beat the heat. With temperatures peaking at 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit) in the afternoon, many were eager to fulfil their democratic duty as quickly as possible and return home to wait for the heat to recede.
“It made a lot more sense to be out before the sun gets stronger,” Devi, 42, told AFP from outside a booth in her neighborhood shortly after polls opened. She admitted that even at that early hour, the heat was taking its toll. “The last few days have been very tough and we’ve tried to stay hydrated and avoided going out as much as possible.”
Even in the morning, polling officials and voters alike had faces coated in a sheen of sweat. Many queuing up grumbled among themselves over long wait times outdoors and in corridors without overhead fans or air conditioning.
Varanasi, the spiritual capital of the Hindu faith, is where Indians bring their deceased loved ones for funeral rites at crematoriums lining the banks of the Ganges river. Most of the year, it is a thriving religious center that hosts pilgrims visiting temples, religious processions through ancient alleyways, and a regular stream of Western tourists seeking enlightenment. However, by midday, streets and polling stations were deserted as the city’s two million residents retreated from yet another day of blazing heat.
India is no stranger to searing summer temperatures, but years of scientific research have found that climate change is causing heatwaves to become longer, more frequent, and more intense.
Heatstroke has killed dozens of people across northern India this week, according to state government figures and local media reports, with peak temperatures in several cities well above 45 degrees Celsius.
This includes ten election workers in the eastern state of Bihar, who died in a single day on Thursday (30) while setting up polling booths.
Abnormally high temperatures have been a constant burden for both poll workers and the public throughout the election, which was staggered over six weeks to ease the logistical burden of servicing India’s 968 million eligible voters.
Turnout has dropped several percentage points since the last national poll, with analysts saying that hotter-than-average temperatures were partly to blame, along with widespread expectations that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will win a third term.
In the city of Mathura, a three-hour drive from New Delhi, election commission figures showed turnout dropping nearly nine points to 52 percent from five years earlier due to the hot weather.
The heat has also disrupted campaigning. Roads Minister Nitin Gadkari fainted while addressing a rally for Modi’s party in April and was carried off the stage by handlers, later blaming the incident on discomfort “due to the heat.”
India’s election commission reiterated on Friday that it had directed polling stations to “take adequate measures to manage the adverse impact of hot weather” on voters. It also defended itself against suggestions that it had failed to consider the impact of the heatwave on voting. “In spite of hot weather conditions, voters have turned up in huge numbers at the polling stations,” a commission statement said.
Little by way of relief was evident at one polling station in Varanasi, where poll workers had erected white canvas sheets to shield queues from the sun and put out communal plastic water jugs for voters in need of rehydration.
Polling booth official Kshem Kumar Pathak, 43, told AFP that he had to turn away one group of women who queued up at the crack of dawn, hoping to cast their votes before the sun rose.
“We obviously explained the rules to them and asked them to come back later,” he said. “Everyone wants to avoid the queues in this heat and hopes to get back home as early as possible.”
Pathak remained stoic about the impact of the heat on himself and his colleagues. “There isn’t much we can do about the temperature,” he said. “It’s obviously tough, but this is our duty.”
