NEW DELHI
Narendra Modi has led the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party out of a decade in opposition with a landslide victory in India's parliamentary elections on Friday.
“This is the first time in India’s independent history that a non-Congress federal government has been formed on its own,” said Modi from his Vadodara constituency, which he won by more than 500,000 votes. “I will take everyone along in running India.”
With the results of less than 60 constituencies left to be confirmed, the BJP has won 274 seats, enough needed to form a government on its own. Together with its allies, the BJP will command more than 300 seats in parliament.
The Congress party-led coalition government, which has ruled India since 2004, is set to win only 44 seats and conceded defeat early in the day. The mother and son leadership of the party, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, accepted responsibility for the resounding defeat.
“Congress has done pretty badly, a lot for us to think about. As vice-president, I hold myself responsible," said Rahul Gandhi, who retained his Amethi constituency.
“This is a Modi revolution not a Modi wave," BJP spokesperson M.J. Akbar told Anadolu Agency. "The results are a reflection of aspirations of the 21st century politics. The Congress party is still trapped in the 19th century politics."
Delhi-based lawyer Kabeer Shrivastava told Anadolu Agency of his pride at the outcome. “In matters of Indian politics, I’ve not found myself speechless before. Repetitive goose bumps, incessant phone calls, messages of congratulations -- all of them meant little when one reflected upon the decisive intelligence shown by the people of India.”
Arvind Kejriwal's anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party, won only four seats nationwide. Kejriwal, who lost against Modi in Uttar Pradesh's holy city Varanasi, conceded defeat saying it’s a good start for the party, which seeks to establish national footprint.
Shrivastava said the AAP was not able to have same effect on a national level that it had when it formed Delhi's state government in December 2013.
“Real revolutions do not take place on the streets. Most of the time, street revolutions are a theatrical show orchestrated by vested interests who carefully hide themselves from the agitators,” he said. “Almost every power shift caused by street revolutions resulted in nothing but forceful replacement of one poor leader with another.”
India’s stock exchange reached an all-time high, based on the BJP victory.
Across the country thousands celebrated the BJP’s landslide victory by distributing sweets and setting off fireworks. But pockets of the 180-million strong Muslim community, who have traditionally voted for the centrist Congress party, wore a defeated look.
“Today the sun appears to set for a secular India. Muslims are isolated as never before. Where have we gone wrong?” Juzar Bandukwala, a Vadodara-based retired professor, whose house was attacked during 2002 communal riots, told AA. “This 200 million community is among the poorest and most illiterate in the country. Now it will be ruled by Modi, whose track record in Gujarat does not inspire any trust at all."
Commenting on the political parties' percentage of vote-share, journalist Anil Bhatia told AA that post-election seat-share could be misleading.
“Even in this wave, BJP’s vote share is restricted to 31.5% and Congress is still holding to 19.6%. That means while one out of three Indians has turned into full blown masculine Hindutva, one in five Indians still prefers good old Nehruvian consensus approach to running the country,” Bhatia told AA. “The BJP has a majority in lower house of Indian parliament but it does have the country’s majority will."
The BJP has performed exceptionally well in key Indian states. The party has made strong gains in India’s biggest Uttar Pradesh state, which makes and breaks prime ministers, where it is set to win 71 seats out of the 80.
The same trend is being followed in adjoining Bihar state where the BJP has won more than half of the seats, according to the election commission.
The BJP-ruled states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan have given barely any seats to the Congress party.
In contrast the Trinamool Congress, whose leader Mamata Banerjee has been locked in a public spat with Modi, has won 34 out of 42 seats in West Bengal.
The same trend is present in southern Tamil Nadu, where chief minister Jayalalithaa of All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party has emerged a powerful regional force, winning 32 seats and leading in five out of a total 39 seats.
A number of senior Congress ministers including Law Minister Kapil Sibal and Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid lost their seats. Arun Jaitley, a top BJP leader and close confidante of Modi lost against Congress candidate Amarinder Singh, Punjab's former chief minister.
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