Modi victory predicted as India’s five-week vote draws to a close
● Result expected on Thursday ● Opposition question schedule
Voting in India’s mammoth national election has ended as exit polls predicted a victor y for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party.
Vote counting begin son Thursday, after ag rue ling poll that lasted more than five weeks, and the election result will likely be known the same day.
The election is seen as a referendum on Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP’ s main opposition is the Congress party, led by Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has produced three prime ministers.
Exit polls by two leading television news channels, Republic and Timesnow, projected a victor y for the BJP and its allies with 287 to 305 seats out of 543 - far ahead of the 272 seats needed to form the next government.
The Congress part y and its allies are likely to win 124 to 128 seats, the TV channels said - although Indian television channels have a mixed record in the past in predicting election results.
Gandhi questioned the way the election was conducted by the autonomous Election Commission, saying the election schedule was manipulated to help Modi’s party.
“The EC used to be feared & respected. Not anymore,” Gandhi tweeted yesterday, without giving any details.
Yesterday’s voting covered Modi’s constituency of Varanasi, a holy Hindu city where he was elected in 2014 with an impressive margin of over 200,000 votes.
Modi spent Saturday night at Kedarnath, a temple of the Hindu god Shiva nestled in the Himalayas in northern India.
The final election round included 59 constituencies in eight states. In Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, voters lined up outside polling stations early Sunday morning to avoid the scorching heat, with temperatures reaching 38C. Armed security officials stood guard in and outside the centers amid fear of violence, though the election proved largely peceful.
Voter turnout in the first six rounds was approximately 66%, the Election Commission said, up from 58% in the last national election in 2014.
Voters were also up early Sunday in Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh state, where election workers arranged for drinking water, shade and fans to cool them down. “I straight away came from my morning walk to cast my vote and was surprised to see enthusiasm among the voters ,” said Ra mesh Kumar Singh, who was among the first to vote.
“There were long queues of people waiting patiently to cast their votes, which is a good sign for democracy.”
Minorities in India, especially Muslims, who comprise about 14 percent of the country’ s 1.3 billion people, have criticised Modi for his Hindu nationalist agenda. Modi’s party backed a bill that would make it easier to deport millions of Bangladeshis who have migrated to India since Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. The bill, however, eases a path to citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Parsees and Jains-non-Muslims-who came from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan over decades.
During the election campaign, Mod i played up the threat of Pakistan, India’ s Muslim-majority neighbour and archrival, especially after the suicide bombing of a para military convoy in Kashmir on February 14 that killed 40 Indian soldiers.
Congress and other opposition parties have challenged Modi over a high unemployment rate of 6.1 per cent and farmers’ distress aggravated by low crop prices.
Pre - election polls indicate that no party is likely to win anything close to a majority in Parliament, which has 543 seats.
The BJP, which won a majority of 282 seats in 2014, may need some regional parties as allies to stay in power.