New Delhi: The results of 542 out of 543 Lok Sabha seats have been announced by the Election Commission of India. The Congress has won 99 seats and the BJP 240.
We’re still awaiting the results for the Maharashtra Beed constituency, where the BJP’s Pankaja Munde is trailing behind NCP (Sharad Pawar) candidate Bajrang Manohar Sonwane.
Although there are 543 members of the Lok Sabha, 542 seats were counted as the BJP’s candidate from Surat, Mukesh Dalal, won the seat without a challenge.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to lead the government for a third term in a row, according to the results of the election that were announced early on Wednesday. This is despite the fact that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) suffered crushing losses in three states in the Hindi heartland, and the election was fiercely contested and widely perceived as a referendum on Modi’s popularity.
A far cry from the 303 and 282 seats it had won in 2019 and 2014, respectively, to have a majority on its own, the BJP, whose candidates ran on the platform of Modi, won 240 seats, falling short of the 272 majority mark and requiring the support of allies in the party-led NDA for government formation.
With support from key allies N Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), which won 16 and 12 seats in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, respectively, and other alliance partners, the NDA crossed the halfway mark.
The Congress, which is part of the opposition INDIA bloc, won 99 seats compared to 52 it won in 2019, eating into the BJP’s share in Rajasthan and Haryana.
As the Samajwadi Party kept the INDIA bloc’s morale high in Uttar Pradesh with 37 seats, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), another key member of the opposition alliance, won 29 seats in West Bengal, higher than its 2019 tally of 22. The BJP, which had won 18 seats in the last Lok Sabha elections, won 12 seats.
The exit polls and the BJP-led NDA had anticipated a landslide victory, but that was not what the results showed.
The greatest democratic exercise in history was scheduled to take place in seven parts from April 19 to June 1 and involved the counting of over 640 million votes.