New Delhi:
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi looked on course Thursday for a major
victory in the world’s biggest election, with early trends suggesting his Hindu
nationalist party will win a bigger majority even than 2014.
Right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Indian PM and
allies are currently leading on 340 seats, NDTV reported Thursday.
Main opposition party, Indian National Congress along with
allied parties are far behind the ruling coalition with 91 seats in the house
of 542. While, the non-aligned parties were leading on 111 seats.
In Lok Sabha, the lower house of Indian Parliament, support
of 272 members is needed to form the government.
If confirmed -- no actual results have been published yet --
this would push the Hindu nationalist BJP over the 272 seats needed for a
majority on its own, and beat its tally of 282 when Modi swept to power in the
world’s biggest democracy in 2014 with the first majority in 30 years.
Having risen strongly since exit polls on Sunday had pointed
to a Modi victory, Indian stock markets on Thursday hit record new highs
shortly after opening, with the Sensex and the Nifty indices both up more than
two percent.
After an exercise not short of staggering statistics, the
600 million votes cast in purportedly the world’s most expensive democratic
exercise -- costing more than $7 billion, experts say -- were set to be counted
in just one day.
Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, hoping to become the
fourth member of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty to lead India, had on Wednesday dismissed
the exit polls.
"Don’t get disappointed by the propaganda of fake exit
polls," Gandhi, 48, told the party faithful on Twitter.
Early trends also suggested that Gandhi was in a tight race
in his constituency of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh state, a seat held by his family
for generations.
Indian exit polls are notoriously unreliable. In 2004 they
pointed to a BJP victory but the results told a different story, bringing a
Congress-led government to power.
Results in several regions such as Uttar
Pradesh, India’s
most populous state which formed the core of Modi’s support in 2014, and West Bengal in the east, will be key.
- Insults and fake news -
The vast size of India
stretching from the Himalayas to the Tropics,
taking in polluted megacities, deserts and jungles, meant the election
stretched over six weeks.
The campaign was awash with insults -- Modi was likened to
Hitler and a "gutter insect" -- as well as fake news disseminated on
social media in Facebook and WhatsApp’s biggest markets.
Gandhi, 48, tried several lines of attack against Modi, in
particular over alleged corruption in a French defence deal and over the
desperate plight of farmers and the lacklustre economy.
Unemployment is reported to be at a four-decade high with Asia’s third-biggest economy growing too slowly to create
jobs for the million Indians entering the labour market every month.
Modi’s shock cash ban in 2016 -- not even his cabinet were
informed before his televised address to the nation -- disrupted livelihoods.
Foreign investment has however increased.
Modi, a former cadre in the militaristic hardline Hindu
group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and chief minister of Gujurat in 2002
when riots killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, is also seen as
divisive.
Lynchings of Muslims and low-caste Dalits for eating beef
and slaughtering and trading in cattle have risen, adding to anxiousness among
the 170-million-strong Muslim population, the world’s second biggest.
Under Modi several cities with names rooted in India’s Islamic Mughul past have been re-named,
while some school textbooks have been changed to downplay Muslims’
contributions to India.
Vinod Bansal, a spokesman for the Hindu nationalist Vishwa
Hindu Parishad (VHP), told AFP he wants a "complete ban" on the
slaughter of cows, sacred to most Hindus.
"If Modi again comes to power we are doomed,"
Hassan Khalid Azmi, a retired chemistry professor in the northern city of Azamgarh, told AFP
earlier this month.
