NEW DELHI: Close to 100 million people voted in 12 states on Thursday in the sixth round of India’s nine-stage parliamentary election that was held to pick 121 MPs in a battle vital for major stakeholders.

As many as 45 of the seats are held currently by the ruling Congress and its allies; the BJP and its allies hold 47. The races involved Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, which are all voting in phases. India has now voted for 232 of 543 parliamentary seats.

Despite stray incidents of violence and intimidation, the mammoth exercise involving 1,767 contestants across the length and breadth of the countrypassed off peacefully, the Election Commission said.

Ousted BJP leader Jaswant Singh accused Rajasthan’s Vasundhara Raje government of misusing government machinery during the Lok Sabha elections and has registered a complaint with the Election Commission in this matter.

Mr Singh, who is contesting as an independent after being denied a ticket by the BJP, forwarded a complaint to the EC through his aide Rajendra Singh Bhiyad on Wednesday, alleging that the government machinery was being misused through various ways in favour of Sonaram Choudhary, the ruling party’s candidate from the constituency.

Official estimates at the end of 11 hours of balloting showed that at least 50 per cent of the 191 million electorate voted onThursday. Polling in the lone Manipur seat ended at 4 p.m.

Thursday’s election covered a vast part of India — from Jammu and Kashmir in the north to Karnataka in the south, from Maharashtra along the west coast to West Bengal in the east.

Polling took place in all 28 Lok Sabha seats in Karnataka, 20 of the 25 in Rajasthan, 19 of the 48 in Maharashtra, 11 Pradesh, 10 in Madhya Pradesh, seven in Bihar, six in Jharkhand, four in West Bengal, three in Chhattisgarh and one seat each in Manipur and Jammu and Kashmir.

Simultaneous balloting was held for 77 of the 147 assembly seats in Odisha and two assembly constituencies in West Bengal.

With Thursday’s round, polling has been completed in 232 of the 543 seats.

The key polling day came as the Gandhis, who lead the Congress, cranked up the rhetoric in a bid to claw back support from the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi, daughter Priyanka and son Rahul are all on the campaign trail and have pitched Mr Modi as a danger to India’s social fabric. Mrs Gandhi alleged in a speech yesterday that he represents a “dangerous combination of religious fanaticism, power and money”.

Mr Modi, 63, has been wooing voters by promising to get India out of its slowest economic growth in a decade and by pointing to his track record of cutting red tape and attracting investment in his four terms as chief minister of Gujarat.

Amid allegations by detractors that the BJP has spot-lit him too heavily in its campaign, allowing him to overshadow the party, Mr Modi in an interview yesterday said all decisions about his career were taken by the party, and not by him. “I worked as backroom boy (for the party) for many years,” he said.