For centuries, the ancient sacred city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh has been a magnet for the devout and the dying.

Located on the banks of the Ganges, Varanasi is sometimes called Kashi or the the city of light. Hindus believe that anyone cremated here and their ashes scattered in the holy river that runs through it have their souls set free.

Today this Hindu holy centre is the epicenter of the Indian general elections scheduled for April and May.

This is where the mother of all battles in the coming election will be staged, Indian media has declared.

The biggest fight will be between Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and social activist  Arvind Kejriwal the chief of the upstart Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

As if this was not interesting enough, the latest to announce their cards for Varanasi is a mafia don-turned-politician and a eunuch. The gangster, currently lodged in a high-security prison, announced his candidature while in a court for appearance in a murder case.

Mukhtar Ansari is pegging his hopes on the 250,000 Muslim voters in Varanasi. He had given a tough time to top BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi in the 2009 election and had lost only by a narrow margin of about 20,000 votes.

He will be representing the Quami Ekta Dal (QED) this time and is a sitting legislator from Mau district, a seat he has represented four times.

Eunuchs too have decided to jump into the fray and it has been decided that Kamla, a eunuch, would take on Modi in the big battle in the temple town.

A resolution to this effect was passed at a eunuch convention in Gorakhpur last week and eunuchs from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand have been asked to travel to Varanasi the coming week and begin door-to-door campaign for their candidate.

"This is not an election of Varanasi... This is to decide what will happen to India, what kind of country we want,” said Kejriwal.

Arvind Kejriwal was an IRS officer, then a social activist before entering into the politics with an objective to clean the system and making it corruption free. He was the chief minister of Delhi for 49 days. Kejriwal and his party showed a zero tolerance towards corruption. The AAP has declared to contest from 350 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. He attacked Modi by calling him an ‘agent’ of industrial tycoons. Kejriwal even added that if Modi would come into power more and more land will be taken away from the farmers and given to the big industrialists.

Modi, the leader of the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat, is heading his party’s campaign to win back power in a national election.

Supporters of the 62-year-old polarizing figure say he is an incorruptible and efficient technocrat who has led Gujarat unprecedented growth. His opponents say Modi is nothing more than an extremist dictator and a master of hate-laced politics.

The battle for Varanasi will ultimately underline the fight between the ruling Indian National Congress and its allies versus the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Indian National Congress has been in power for the past decade under the leadership of the Italy-born Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. 

Nearly 814 million voters will make their way to polling booths across the country to cast their votes in the largest democratic elections in the world that is to be held in stages beginning later this month.

The general elections, in which voters will choose a total of 543 members to the lower house of Parliament, or Lok Sabha, will also decide the fate of the Indian National Congress, the oldest party in the country, which leads the governing coalition in New Delhi.

Several political analysts and opinion polls have projected that the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Modi, will have the best chance of forming the next government. But complicating factors include the emergence of Aam Aadmi Party and a host of strong regional players that could turn their collective backs on any national alliance.

The BJP says Modi's victory from Varanasi "was a foregone conclusion and that the scale would be one of the highest in the state".