Modi eyes national stage in Gujarat election Gujaratis went to the polls on Thursday in an election that could decide whether Narendra Modi, the state's Hindu nationalist chief minister, will fulfil his ambition to become prime minister of India. Most politicians and pollsters, including Mr Modi's rivals in the Congress party, expect him to win a fourth term to govern Gujarat's 60m people in western India because of the state's robust economic growth over the past decade. "I urge you all to exercise your franchise," he tweeted on Thursday morning. But his chances of becoming the next prime ministerial candidate for his Bharatiya Janata party - which is in opposition to the Congress-led coalition government at the national level - will depend on the scale of his expected victory. The BJP has 117 of the 182 seats in the Gujarat assembly. If Mr Modi secures an even greater majority, that would give him a platform from which to launch his bid to lead the world's largest democracy. A general election is due by mid-2014. But the combination of "anti-incumbency" - voter weariness of a man who has been in charge for more than a decade - and the creation of a breakaway Hindu nationalist party by the 84-year-old Keshubhai Patel, a veteran politician and former Modi ally, could weaken his prospects. Mr Modi is detested by some liberal and leftwing Indians - both Hindu and Muslim - because of his past as a Hindu fundamentalist firebrand. They hold him responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of Muslims by Hindu mobs in Gujarat in 2002, shortly after he became chief minister for the first time. A decade after the riots, Maya Kodnani, one of Mr Modi's political associates, was sentenced to 28 years in jail this year for murder and conspiracy in a massacre of Muslims in Ahmedabad. Mr Modi denies involvement in the violence and says he "should be hanged in public" if his government was responsible. The latest Gujarat election campaign, however, has been dominated by arguments between the BJP and Congress over the performance of the local economy. Rahul Gandhi - son of Congress leader Sonia Gandhi and the party's likely candidate for prime minister - mocked Mr Modi as a "marketeer" who made false claims about progress when water supplies and jobs were scarce. "There are 1m unemployed youth in Gujarat, but the marketeer says Gujarat is shining," he told a campaign rally this week. Mr Modi, who boasted of "efficient governance" in a recent interview with the Financial Times, is equally scornful of the Gandhi family and its patchy record in governing India and, unlike Rahul Gandhi, is an accomplished orator with years of experience as a politician and administrator. "I don't think Rahul will find any more traction than he did in UP," said Sumit Ganguly, politics professor at Indiana University, referring to Mr Gandhi's failure to make an impact in an important state election in Uttar Pradesh earlier this year. Mr Ganguly said Indian voters were increasingly sophisticated and were not impressed by Mr Gandhi being parachuted in for a rally, "donning the Gujarat headgear and making some anodyne remarks about Modi's inability to do anything about poverty." Gujarat has long been regarded by investors as a business-friendly state, and its economy grew at an average 10.5 per cent a year in the decade to 2010, against 8 per cent for India as a whole. Gujarat has 5 per cent of India's population but accounts for 16 per cent of industrial output. Critics of Mr Modi nevertheless say that education and healthcare are in a sorry state and that capital-intensive growth has failed to create jobs. "The high growth in Gujarat has been accompanied by a dismal growth in employment," economist Atul Sood writes in a new book on Gujarat, Poverty Amidst Prosperity: Essays on the Trajectory of Development in Gujarat. Gujaratis vote in two phases, with the south voting on Thursday and the north on Monday. The votes are counted on December 20.