India: Modi’s alliance should obtain a large majority in Parliament – polls

by YP Rajesh, Sakshi Dayal and Tanvi Mehta

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – The alliance led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is expected to obtain a large majority in Parliament in the legislative elections which ended on Saturday, news channels report. television based on exit polls from the polling stations.

Such a result would be beyond most analysts’ predictions, with exit polls predicting the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to take two-thirds of the seats in the 543-seat lower house of Parliament. The simple majority is set at 272 seats.

With such a majority, the government could make profound changes to the constitution.

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According to six exit polls, the NDA could win between 355 and 380 seats, a score which should be welcomed by the financial markets on Monday. The NDA won 353 seats in the 2019 assembly elections, including 303 for the BJP.

The opposition alliance “INDIA” led by Rahul Gandhi’s Congress party is expected to win between 125 and 165 seats.

For his first statement after the vote, Narendra Modi claimed victory without referring to the exit polls.

“I can say with confidence that the people of India voted in record numbers to renew the NDA government,” he said on the social network X, without proof of his claims.

“The opportunistic INDIA alliance has failed to strike a chord with voters. They are casteist, communal and corrupt,” he added.

Exit polls in India, conducted by polling firms, have had a mixed record as they have often been wrong, with analysts saying it is difficult to obtain reliable results in such a large and diverse country. .

Polls taken before the vote indicated that the BJP would easily retain its majority for these elections. But the virulence of the ‘INDIA’ alliance’s election campaign has sown doubts, with many political analysts predicting that the BJP’s margin would be narrower than or close to that of 2019.

The opposition rejected the exit polls as “pre-established” before their publication. Most opposition parties accuse India’s major news channels of being biased in favor of Narendra Modi, an accusation these TV channels deny. The opposition also claims that exit polls in India are generally not based on scientific methods.

“This is a government exit poll, a Narendra Modi exit poll,” Congress social media in-charge Supriya Shrinate told news agency ANI, in which Reuters has a minority participation.

(Reporting by YP Rajesh and Krishn Kaushik; with contributions from Shivam Patel, Tanvi Mehta, Sakshi Dayal and Chris Thomas; French version Claude Chendjou)