Lok Sabha Election Result 2019 LIVE Updates: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday led his Bharatiya Janata Party towards a resounding victory for a second term in office as the BJP has touched the 300 mark on its own while the NDA is at 350 seats, crossing the humongous tally of 2014. The BJP has demolished the combined opposition with the Congress Party stuck at 50 seats, according to the trends. Modi himself won in Varanasi with a margin of over 3.5 lakh votes while party president Amit Shah won in Gandhinagar in their home state of Gujarat by over 4 lakh votes.
In the politically critical state of Uttar Pradesh, where the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party had posed a stiff challenge, the BJP is leading in 59 of the 80 seats at stake. The SP is ahead in seven and BSP in 13. The Congress Party was ahead only in one. Even, Congress President Rahul Gandhi is trailing in Amethi to BJP’s Smriti Irani.
The results are a resounding endorsement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, his government’s achievements in the last five years and his campaign, which centred around national security and nationalism. He also relentlessly attacked the Congress Party for what he called its dynastic legacy, and blamed it for the country’s woes. The opposition had criticised the BJP campaign as divisive and polarising.
The Modi wave not only swept through the Hindi heartland and Gujarat, as was expected, but also rippled through West Bengal, Odisha, Maharashtra and Karnataka. Only Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana appeared untouched.
In Odisha, the BJP was ahead in nine of the 21 seats and Biju Janata Dal was ahead in 11. In 2014, the BJD had won 20 seats and BJP took one. In Telangana, the Telangana Rashtra Samiti was leading in nine seats, the BJP in four and Congress in three.
In Bihar, the RJD and the Congress have been decimated as both Janata Dal (United) and the BJP were ahead in 16 seats. Another NDA ally, Ram Vilas Paswan’s LJP is winning six seats.
As votes for the seven-phase Parliamentary polls were counted on Thursday, the Trinamool Congress Party was leading in 25 of 42 seats of West Bengal while BJP was ahead in 15, up from two it held in 2014. The Left was wiped out in the state, once its citadel.
The DMK was ahead in 20 seats in Tamil Nadu. As the trends came in, pointing to another tenure of Modi as prime minister, celebrations broke out in the BJP’s party offices across the country with people dancing to the sounds of drums.
The trends of the ruling party’s leads were in sync with the exit polls, most of which predicted that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) would be on course to retain power for a second term. In 2014, the BJP won 282 seats, leaving the Congress with an all-time low of 44 seats against the 206 it won in 2009.
The counting exercise is on in over 4,000 counting centres amid concerns raised by opposition parties over alleged tampering of EVMs. They have asked the Election Commission to ensure transparency in counting. Election Commission officials said results are expected only by late evening.
The voting was staggered between April 11 and May 19 in which around 67 per cent of the nearly 900 million eligible people exercised their franchise to elect 542 members of the Lok Sabha from a total of 8,049 contestants. For the first time in Lok Sabha polls, the EC is tallying the vote count on Electronic Voting Machines with voter verified paper audit trail slips in five polling stations in each assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency.
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