New Delhi: The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance is poised to secure a third term, winning 293 Lok Sabha seats, with the saffron party managing 240 seats, and failing to reach the 272-majority mark.
The opposition INDIA bloc, courtesy of encouraging performances from the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh and the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, has secured 232 seats. The Congress has increased its tally to 99 seats.
The Election Commission of India has declared results for all Lok Sabha constituencies. The last result to be announced was that of Beed constituency in Maharashtra, where NCP (Sharad Pawar) candidate Bajrang Manohar Sonwane defeated the BJP's Pankaja Munde by 6,553 votes. While the Lok Sabha has 543 members, counting was held for 542 seats after the BJP's Surat candidate Mukesh Dalal was elected unopposed.
According to the final results, declared early on Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is poised to form the government for a third consecutive term with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) getting a majority in the Lok Sabha, notwithstanding crushing losses in three Hindi heartland states after a bitterly fought election that was projected as a referendum on his popularity.
The BJP, whose candidates contested in the name of Modi, won in 240 seats, falling short of the 272 majority mark and needing the support of allies in the party-led NDA for government formation, a far cry from the 303 and 282 seats it had won in 2019 and 2014, respectively, to have a majority on its own.
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 results did not throw up a landslide victory the BJP-led NDA had hoped for and what was projected by the exit polls. More than 640 million votes were to be counted in the world's largest democratic exercise, conducted from April 19 to June 1 in seven phases.
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