The stars trooped out and so did villagers on Thursday as millions of poor and the affluent voted in the third leg of the General Elections that even veteran politicians admitted was destined to give the country another coalition government.

Voters queued up outside some 165,000 polling centres in 107 Lok Sabha seats spread across nine states and two union territories in a 10-hour exercise, during which both the ruling Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed they would finish on top of a fractured house.