NEW DELHI (AP) — Charismatic but polarizing Prime Minister Narendra Modi surged to a landslide victory in Indian elections, propelling his Hindu nationalist party to back-to-back majorities in parliament for the first time in decades.
The Election Commission of India reports that the Bharatiya Janata Party won 303 out of the 542 constituencies in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. The party’s top rival, the Indian National Congress, won 52 seats which have a part of Mahaghatbandan failed badly against Modi led BJP party.
With most of the estimated 600 million votes counted by early Friday, Modi’s reelection mirrored a trend of right-wing populists sweeping to victory, from the United States to Brazil to Italy, often by promoting a tough security stance and protectionist trade policies. India’s elections were seen as a referendum on Modi’s Hindu-first politics, which critics say have bred intolerance, as well as his muscular stance on archrival Pakistan, with whom India nearly went to war earlier this year.
The count that started Thursday was expected to conclude by the evening. In the world’s largest democratic exercise, some 900 million people were registered to cast ballots for 542 seats in India’s lower house of Parliament in seven phases of voting staggered over six weeks.
A party or coalition needs a simple majority, or 272 seats, to govern.
Half a dozen exit polls showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party remaining in power for another five years.
Election Commission results showed BJP textiles minister Smriti Irani won by 52,000 votes in Amethi, a longtime Nehru-Gandhi family bastion in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
Trends in the election data suggest that BJP’s strategy of aggressively campaigning in eastern India worked, with the party breaking into the citadels of Trinamool Congress Party in West Bengal state and the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha state.
The biggest losers appear to be the Communists who ruled West Bengal state for 34 years until they were ousted by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress Party in 2011. Coalition partners of the Congress-led government in New Delhi between 2004 and 2008, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was leading in only three constituencies and the Communist Party of India in two constituencies.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party have declared victory later in the eveing as an ongoing vote-count shows them with a commanding lead in the country’s massive general election.
Addressing thousands of party workers celebrating the outcome, Modi urged the world to “recognize India’s democratic power.” He attributed the party’s showing to his policies aimed at improving the lot of the nation’s poor, including free medical insurance, relief for distressed farmers and a highly popular program to build 100 million toilets in a nation where basic sanitation is limited.
Outside BJP headquarters in New Delhi, hundreds of people cheered and shouted party slogans, lifting cardboard cutouts of Modi and BJP President Amit Shah into the air as other people played drums and set off fireworks.
BJP President Amit Shah credited Modi’s “leadership” for the presumptive win.
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Source/Contribution/Photo by Associated Press