India's Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his allies were heading for victory but with a reduced parliamentary majority, preliminary results showed on Tuesday. The country has emerged from a six-week-long election that saw 642 million people vote in seven stages.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in first place on 38.1 percent with three quarters of votes counted in India's election, national election commission data showed.
The BJP and its coalition allies were leading in at least 286 seats, the commission's figures showed, above the 272 needed for a lower house parliamentary majority but significantly lower than their joint total of 353 after the last election in 2019.
Modi, 73, said at the weekend he was confident that "the people of India have voted in record numbers" to re-elect his government, a decade after he first became prime minister.
But stocks slumped over seven percent on India's benchmark Sensex index in afternoon trade, after opposition parties appeared to have put up a better-than-expected fight, suggesting a reduced majority for Modi's BJP.
Shares in the main listed unit of Adani Enterprises – owned by key Modi ally Gautam Adani – dropped 25 percent.
'Hobbling' challengers
Modi's opponents have struggled to counter the BJP's well-oiled and well-funded campaign juggernaut, and have been hamstrung by what they say are politically motivated criminal cases aimed at hobbling challengers.
US think tank Freedom House said this year that the BJP had "increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents".
Arvind Kejriwal, chief minister of the capital Delhi and a key leader in an alliance formed to compete against Modi, returned to jail on Sunday.
Kejriwal, 55, was detained in March over a long-running corruption probe, but was later released and allowed to campaign as long as he returned to custody once voting ended.
"When power becomes dictatorship, then jail becomes a responsibility," Kejriwal said before surrendering himself, vowing to continue "fighting" from behind bars.
Concerns among Muslims
Many of India's Muslim minority are increasingly uneasy about their future and their community's place in the constitutionally secular country.
Modi himself made several strident comments about Muslims on the campaign trail, referring to them as "infiltrators".
The polls were staggering in their size and logistical complexity, with voters casting their ballots in megacities New Delhi and Mumbai, as well as in sparsely populated forest areas and the high-altitude territory of Kashmir.
Votes were cast on electronic voting machines, so the tally will be rapid, with results expected later Tuesday.
Counting began in the morning at key tally centres in each state, with the data fed into computers.
"People should know about the strength of Indian democracy," chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar said Monday, vowing there was a "robust counting process in place".
In past years, key trends have been clear by mid-afternoon with losers conceding defeat, even though full and final results may only come late on Tuesday night.
Turnout down slightly
Celebrations had already begun at the headquarters of Modi's BJP before the full announcement of results.
But based on the commission's figure of an electorate of 968 million, turnout came to 66.3 percent, down roughly one percentage point from 67.4 percent in the last polls in 2019.
Final voter data is yet to be released as repolling took place in two stations in West Bengal state on Monday.
Analysts have partly blamed the lower turnout on a searing heatwave across northern India, with temperatures over 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit).
(with AFP)
