The party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi emerges as winner of the legislative elections in India with 38.1% of the votes, after the scrutiny of three quarters of the votes, although everything indicates that its parliamentary majority will be reduced.
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Although the figure is above the 272 seats necessary to have an absolute majority, This is a distance much greater than that predicted by the exit polls and very far from the 400 seats that Modi and the rest of the leaders of his party indicated their objective in these elections, in which the prime minister seeks his third consecutive term.
“We had set out to reach 400 seats but we are not even close,” lamented one of his followers in front of the BJP headquarters, Ratan Ranjan, however certain of a victory.
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The party and its allies aspired to have 400 of the 543 seats in the Lower House of Parliament.
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“The BJP failed to win a large majority on its own. It is a moral defeat for them,” opposition lawmaker Rajeev Shukla told reporters.
After a decade promoting his Hindu nationalist agenda, The 73-year-old leader is heading towards a third term despite accusations from the opposition and concerns about the rights of religious minorities.
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A total of 642 million people participated in these elections divided into seven phases over six weeks, faced with the logistical challenge of organizing an election in the most populous nation in the world.
The elections represented a logistical challenge in this huge country, with polls in megacities such as New Delhi and Bombay, but also in isolated forest areas and in the conflictive region of Kashmir, at the foot of the Himalayas.
After a decade promoting his Hindu nationalist agenda, the 73-year-old leader is heading for a third term.
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On the contrary, His opponents improved their electoral performance despite the fact that they had to face legal proceedings which they denounce as part of a political campaign by Modi against dissent.
The American think tank Freedom House also indicated that this year the BJP “increasingly used government institutions to attack its political rivals.”
The prime minister’s policy also arouses misgivings among the religious minority of more than 200 million Muslims, restless about their future in this constitutionally secular country.
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Supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) celebrate the results of the vote count.
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To facilitate counting, voters voted with electronic voting machines.
In previous elections, The trends were already clear by mid-afternoon and the opposition conceded defeat, although the final results were not published until the evening.
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Although the head of the electoral commission celebrated a “world record” of 642 million votes in the elections, participation fell slightly compared to 2019, from 67.4% to 66.3%. Analysts attribute this decline to high temperatures in recent weeks in northern India, often around 45°C.
And as the count progresses, The drop in support for the BJP and its allies had an impact on the Indian stock market, with a 7% drop in the benchmark Sensex index.
Shares of the company’s main unit Adani Enterprises, owned by a key Modi ally Gautam Adani, also lost 25%.
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