By Shakir Husain
NEW DELHI: The vote count on late Tuesday indicated India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has failed to achieve a simple majority.
The counting of 642 million votes, which were polled between April 19 and June 1 in the marathon electoral exercise by the Election Commission, began in the morning and showed that the opposition bloc put up a better than expected fight in the parliamentary election.
The ruling BJP was expected to win 240 seats, followed by the main opposition Indian National Congress getting 98 seats, as per the trends and official results.
The Samajwadi Party was expected to win 37 seats, the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) of West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee was projected to get 29, and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) of Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin led in 22 places.
The Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s bicameral parliament, has 543 elected members.
The Congress, Samajwadi and the DMK are part of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), which includes more than two dozen parties united to oust the BJP from power.
The INDIA bloc’s performance is far better than the exit polls by most Indian media companies and pollsters suggested.
In the 2019 election, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won 353 seats, with the BJP alone grabbing 303 seats.
As the BJP is well short of the 272 seats needed for a simple majority, it will require support of other parties to form a new government.
The BJP’s weaker than expected showing gives its potential coalition partners more bargaining power as Modi will seek a third term as prime minister.
In Uttar Pradesh, which accounts for 80 of the lower house seats, the opposition made big gains.
Notably, the BJP candidate Lallu Singh lost to Awadesh Prasad of the Samajwadi Party in Faizabad, the constituency which includes Ayodhya, the city where Modi inaugurated the Ram temple in January amid intense publicity.
Modi himself secured a comfortable victory from the Varanasi constituency.
The BJP was ahead in all seven constituencies of the national capital Delhi, and looked set to score near-total wins in the states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
The DMK dominated Tamil Nadu, the AITC was ahead in West Bengal, and the Janata Dal United of chief minister Nitish Kumar performed well in Bihar.
Indian stocks plunged more than five per cent as the counting trends were at odds with the market expectations of a big win for Modi in line with Saturday’s exit polls, which were denounced as manipulated by the opposition as soon as they were published.
The Indian rupee closed 45 paise lower at 83.59 against the American dollar.
A strong sympathy vote for independent candidate Abdul Rashid Sheikh, a former state legislator who is lodged in a jail in Delhi following his arrest by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in an alleged case of money laundering, appears to have helped him in Baramulla.
Punjab also looked to produce a win in favour of a candidate contesting from prison.
Waris Punjab De group chief Amritpal Singh, who is in jail in faraway Assam’s Dibrugarh since his arrest in April last year on charges under the stringent National Security Act (NSA), won in Khadoor Sahib.
Assembly polls
Assembly polls in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha and Sikkim were also held.
The BJP won power in Arunachal Pradesh state on China’s border for the third time in a row, while the ruling Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (SKM) in the northeast state of Sikkim secured another term, according to the results for the two states on Sunday.
Former chief minister Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP) has returned to power in Andhra Pradesh by winning a strong majority in the 175-member house, while the party is likely to play a role at the national level.
The TDP led in 16 of the state’s Lok Sabha 25 seats.
In Odisha, the BJP trounced the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) headed by Naveen Patnaik, the eastern state’s chief minister since 2000.
Odisha also tremendously helped the BJP in improving its national parliament tally, with the party leading in 19 of the state’s 21 Lok Sabha seats. – BERNAMA
