Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his allies are moving towards victory in the legislative elections on Tuesday, but with a reduced parliamentary majority and the main opposition party strengthened, according to figures from the electoral commission.
Analysts and exit polls predicted a landslide victory for Mr. Modi and his party, whose campaign appealed to the Hindu majority, much to the dismay of religious minorities.
But for the first time in a decade, Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) may not win a majority alone, and will have to rely on the allies of his coalition, according to figures from the electoral commission.
By contrast, the main opposition party, the Congress, appears poised to nearly double its parliamentary seats, in a remarkable turnaround thanks to deals to field single candidates against the steamroller BJP.
According to figures from the electoral commission after the counting of 87% of the ballots, the BJP and the members of its coalition would obtain at least 288 seats, more than the 272 necessary to obtain a parliamentary majority in the lower house of 543 seats.
The BJP, with 37.3% of the votes, leads with only 244 seats, according to the partial results of the electoral commission, well below the 303 seats won in 2019. The Congress, on the contrary, would win 99 seats against 52 five years earlier.
The celebrations have already started at the BJP headquarters.
“Moral defeat”
But the headquarters of the Congress, the main opposition party, was also jubilant.
“The BJP failed to secure a large majority on its own,” Congress MP Rajeev Shukla told reporters. “It’s a moral defeat for them. »
Faced with a better than expected score from the opposition and a reduced majority for the BJP, the benchmark Sensex index fell more than 7% on the Bombay Stock Exchange, before recovering and losing almost 5% around 08:15 GMT. The stock price of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s main publicly traded company, a key Modi ally, fell 25%.
Given previous general elections, the main trends are usually clear by mid-afternoon, with losers conceding defeat, although full and final results may not arrive until Tuesday night.
Mr. Modi, 73, who remains very popular after two terms, declared this weekend certain that “the Indian people have[vait] voted in record numbers” to re-elect him, after a decade at the head of the country.
The prime minister’s opponents, sometimes paralyzed by internal struggles, struggled with the power of his party and accused the government of exploiting justice for political ends by increasing the number of prosecutions against them.
The American foundation Freedom House also estimated that the BJP had “increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents”.
“Power of Indian democracy”
The opposition and human rights defenders denounce a democratic backsliding and accuse Mr. Modi of favoring Hindus, the majority in the country, to the detriment of significant minorities, including 210 million Muslim Indians, worried about their future.
Conversely, Mr. Modi accused the Congress of wanting to distribute “national wealth” to “infiltrators”, “to those who have the most children”, thus designating the Muslim community.
Indignant, the opposition contacted the electoral authorities who did not sanction the Prime Minister.
However, India is constitutionally secular and its electoral code prohibits any campaign based on “communal sentiments”.
Some 642 million Indians voted in this election which took place in seven phases over a period of six weeks.
Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar on Monday extolled the “incredible power of Indian democracy”.
Based on the 968 million voters recorded by the commission, 66.3% of voters took part in the vote, a drop of one percentage point compared to the 67.4% participation in the 2019 general elections.