It takes a month to elect a new leader in the world’s largest democracy. In remote farming villages and sprawling concrete cities, tens of millions of Indians began voting Thursday amid a deeply fractured political scene largely empty of national issues. The election won’t wrap up until mid-May — and there may not be a new government selected until early June — but a series of bloody guerrilla attacks and blazing summertime temperatures failed to keep voters away from the polls. The vote was the first of five phases in which a total of some 714 million people — more than 10 times the entire French population — will be eligible to go to the polls.