India’s Modi Set to Return to Power With a Bigger Majority, Exit Polls Show

Reuters
By Reuters
May 20, 2019World News
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India’s Modi Set to Return to Power With a Bigger Majority, Exit Polls Show
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks during the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, July 26, 2018. (Reuters/Themba Hadebe/Pool via Reuters)

NEW DELHI—Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to return to power with an even bigger majority in parliament after a mammoth general election that ended on Sunday, May 19, exit polls showed, a far better showing than expected in recent weeks.

Modi faced criticism early on in the campaign for failing to create jobs and for weak farm prices, and analysts, as well as politicians, said the election race was tightening with the main opposition Congress party gaining ground.

But he rallied his Hindu nationalist base and turned the campaign into a fight for national security after tensions rose with Pakistan and attacked his main rival for being soft on the country’s arch-foe.

Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is projected to win anything between 339-365 seats in the 545-member lower house of parliament with the Congress party-led opposition alliance at a distant 77 to 108, India Today Axis exit poll showed.

To rule, a party needs to win 272 seats. Modi’s alliance won 336 seats in the 2014 election. The exit polls showed that he not only held to this base in the northern Hindi belt but also breached the east where regional groups traditionally held sway.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attends the 10th BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa on July 27, 2018. (Mike Hutchings/AFP/Getty Images)

Only the south largely resisted the Hindu nationalist surge, except for Karnataka, home to software capital Bengaluru.

Counting of votes recorded in hundreds of thousands of computerized machines will begin early on Thursday and results are expected by noon.

According to another poll released by Todays Chanakya, Modi’s alliance is likely to get around 350 seats. One poll by Neta Newsx, though, forecast Modi’s group falling 30 seats short.

A man looks at a television screen showing exit poll results
A man looks at a television screen showing exit poll results after the last phase of the general election in Ahmedabad, India, on May 19, 2019. (Amit Dave/Reuters)

Exit polls, though, have a mixed record in a country with an electorate of 900 million people—around two-thirds of whom voted in the seven-phase election. They have often gotten the number of seats wrong, but the broad direction has generally been correct, analysts say.

A clear win would mean Modi can carry out reforms investors expect to make India an easier place for doing business, they said.

Gandhi Loss

The Congress party led by Rahul Gandhi, the fourth generation scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that ruled India for decades following independence, focused on Modi’s failure to deliver on the promises he made to transform the economy and turn India into a manufacturing hub.

Congress spokesman Sanjay Jha dismissed the poll projections, saying that an alliance led by his party would defeat the BJP when votes are counted on May 23.

Men look at a television screen showing exit poll results
Men look at a television screen showing exit poll results after the last phase of the general election in Ahmedabad, India, on May 19, 2019. (Amit Dave/Reuters)

“Many of the pollsters, if not all of the pollsters, have got it wrong,” he said, adding that a polarized atmosphere and fear had kept voters from telling pollsters about their actual allegiance.

Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal state and a bitter opponent of Modi, said the fight was not over.

“I don’t trust exit poll gossip,” she said on Twitter. “I appeal to all opposition parties to be united, strong and bold. We will fight this battle together.”

Voting began on April 11 and ended on Sunday in the world’s biggest democratic exercise.

By Aftab Ahmed and Devjyot Ghoshal

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