(New Delhi) Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party and its allies won India’s legislative elections by a comfortable margin, according to results announced Tuesday evening, but this parliamentary majority has been reduced, and the opposition is emerging stronger of the ballot.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies obtained at least 272 seats out of 543, according to results posted on the Election Commission website, while the results of a small number of constituencies remain to be counted. The BJP, alone, should obtain 240, when it obtained 303 seats in the 2019 legislative elections.
The main opposition Congress party is expected to win 99 seats, almost double the 52 seats it won five years ago.
For the first time in a decade, the party of Narendra Modi, whose campaign won over the Hindu majority to the great dismay of religious minorities, will not have an absolute majority alone and will be forced to rely on the allies of its coalition.
The Prime Minister celebrated the victory even before these partial results.
India has placed its faith in the ruling coalition “for the third time in a row,” he wrote on .
The Congress, the main opposition party, for its part, achieved remarkable progress thanks to agreements aimed at presenting single candidates against the steamroller of the BJP.
“The country told Narendra Modi: ‘We don’t want you,’” Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, re-elected with a lead of more than 364,000 votes in the southern constituency of Wayanad, told the press.
At the BJP headquarters, however, it was time to celebrate the victory. Mr. Modi was re-elected as MP from Varanasi constituency, his third victory also in ancient Banaras, the holy city of Hinduism.
Two of the elected independent MPs are currently serving prison sentences: Sikh separatist Amritpal Singh and Kashmiri Sheikh Abdul Rashid, arrested for “financing terrorism” and money laundering in 2019.
The headquarters of the main opposition Congress party was also jubilant. “The BJP has failed to get a large majority on its own,” Congress MP Rajeev Shukla told reporters. “It is a moral defeat for them.”
Faced with a better-than-expected result for the opposition and a reduced majority for the BJP, the benchmark Sensex index fell by more than 7% on the Bombay Stock Exchange, before recovering and closing down 5.7%.
The share price of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s main publicly traded company, a key Modi ally, fell 25% in session.
Mr. Modi, 73, who remains very popular after two terms, declared this weekend certain that “the Indian people [had] voted in record numbers” to re-elect him, after a decade spent at the head of the country.
The Prime Minister’s opponents, sometimes paralyzed by internal struggles, have struggled in the face of the power of his party and accused the government of using justice for political ends by increasing the number of prosecutions against them.
The American foundation Freedom House also estimated that the BJP had “increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents”.
Denouncing a democratic backsliding, the opposition and human rights defenders have accused Mr. Modi of favoring Hindus, the majority in the country, to the detriment of significant minorities, including 210 million Muslim Indians, worried about their future .
Conversely, Mr. Modi accused the Congress of wanting to distribute “national wealth” to “infiltrators”, “to those who have the most children”, thus designating the Muslim community.
Indignant, the opposition contacted the electoral authorities who did not sanction the Prime Minister.
Some 642 million Indians voted in this election which took place in seven phases spread over a period of six weeks, attracting high turnout.
Based on the 968 million voters recorded by the commission, 66.3% of voters took part in the vote, a little less than in 2019. The participation rate reached 67.4%.
