Modi announces his victory for a third term in the Indian elections

New Delhi (agencies)

Yesterday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi achieved his third victory in the legislative elections, which lasted for more than six weeks.
“The people have placed their trust in the National Democratic Alliance for the third time in a row,” Modi said on the social networking site “X” regarding his coalition. “It is an exceptional incident in the history of India,” he added.
Observers and polls have long expected Modi to achieve a landslide victory, and the main opposition Congress Party is expected to nearly double its number of seats in Parliament, in a remarkable shift driven largely by agreements aimed at fielding individual candidates against the Bharatiya Janata Party.
With more than 95 percent of the votes counted, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s share of the votes reached 36.9 percent, a percentage slightly lower than that recorded in the last elections in 2019.
Election Commission figures showed that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies took the lead, winning 288 seats out of a total of 543 seats, enough to obtain a parliamentary majority.
But the Bharatiya Janata Party itself only won 240 seats, compared to the 303 seats it won five years ago, while the Congress Party won 98 seats compared to 52 in the last elections.
The elections are huge in terms of their size and the logistical complexities associated with them, as 642 million voters cast their votes in major cities such as New Delhi and Bombay, as well as in sparsely populated forest areas and in the Himalayas. Modi had declared his confidence in victory shortly after the last polling stations closed over the weekend, writing on the social media platform (X): “I can say with confidence that the people of India have voted in record numbers to re-elect the National Democratic Alliance government.” Modi set high standards for success, saying that the alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party would win more than 400 of the 543 seats up for election, thus strengthening its majority. Since India is the most populous country in the world, this was the largest election in the world. Chief Election Commissioner Rajeev Kumar said: “People should know how strong Indian democracy is,” stressing: “We have a solid counting process.”
Based on the Commission’s figures, which indicate that the number of registered voters reached 968 million, 66.3 percent of them participated, which is approximately one percentage point lower than that recorded in the last general elections in 2019, when the participation rate reached 67.4 percent.
Analysts partly attributed the decline in participation rates to a heat wave hitting northern India, with temperatures exceeding 45 degrees Celsius.