New Delhi, India – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 73, appears poised for a rare third term and is likely to be re-elected with a landslide, exit polls showed Saturday afternoon, hitting the alliance opposition in the largest democratic vote in the history of the world.
If the official results due out on Tuesday, June 4, support these polls, Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will not only emerge unscathed from rising inequality, record unemployment and rising prices, but could do better than the last elections in 2019. Never before has a prime minister in independent India won three consecutive Lok Sabha elections with better numbers each time.
At least seven exit polls published by Indian media organizations predicted that the BJP and its allies would win between 350 and 380 seats in the 543-seat Lok Sabha, the lower house of India's parliament.
Refusing to reflect on the exit polls, the opposition INDIA alliance – a group of more than two dozen political groups hoping to topple the Hindu-majority BJP government – remained stoically confident that they would secure a majority on recount day.
Exit polls in India have a spotty track record and previous surveys have both underestimated and overestimated the number of different parties. However, they have mostly correctly predicted the major trends of the past two decades, with a few exceptions. Nearly a billion Indians were registered to vote in the mammoth seven-phase elections that spanned six weeks and concluded Saturday night.
“Modi is extraordinarily popular. Everything in this BJP campaign was about Modi for a reason,” said Neelanjan Sircar, senior researcher at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research (CPR). “Certain narratives emerged that suggested people were angry with the government, but translating that into seats was always going to be a challenge.”
BJP expands to new areas
While the opposition INDIA bloc is expected to do well in the country's southern states, most exit polls suggest the BJP could make surprising gains there too.
Various exit polls predict that the BJP could win between 2 and 3 seats in Kerala, the last bastion of the Indian left where Modi's party has never won; while the BJP can win 1-3 seats in Tamil Nadu, where it drew a blank in the last elections. These victories, if they materialize, could give the BJP a foothold in opposition strongholds where it has fought for decades.
The BJP and its allies are also expected to retain their seats in Karnataka – the BJP won 25 of 28 seats in the state in 2019. And it could emerge as the biggest winner in Telangana. Those results would represent a dramatic setback for the opposition Congress party, which leads the INDIA alliance and won state legislative elections (defeating the BJP) in both Karnataka and Telangana last year.
“The progress in the south is surprising. And the predictions suggest a huge gain,” said Asim Ali, a political commentator. “Even if the BJP does not win as many seats [as predicted in the exit polls]The increase in his percentage of votes is a big change.”
Meanwhile, the BJP is expected to sweep its stronghold states, including Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.
The opposition alliance is expected to make marginal gains in Bihar and Rajasthan, both states that the BJP nearly swept in the last elections, and in the northern states of Haryana and Punjab.
Sudha Joshi, a 76-year-old voter from Chittorgarh in Rajasthan, kept her eyes on her smartphone as news anchors shouted at each other about a “thunderous mandate” for Modi on Saturday night. She got the smartphone last year thanks to a welfare scheme administered by the then state government in Congress.
Last December, Rajasthan voted against the Congress and returned the BJP to power in the state.
Joshi's political allegiances have also changed. Born in 1947, when India gained independence, Joshi has never missed an opportunity to vote, she said. Joshi, a traditional Congress voter, said she had lost hope in the Nehru-Gandhi family that dominates the party and instead she came to see a leader in Modi.
“In 2014, when Modi first ran, I could see a leader who would take India to international heights,” he said, ecstatic about the exit polls. “We are satisfied with his government because he is a religious person like us, a true patriot.”
Their views reflect broader sentiment, analysts say.
“A large section of society, with a guy like Modi at the top, someone you 'can believe in', can only imagine him as a leader today,” said the CPR's Sircar. “The BJP owes its success to Modi's popularity.”
Zafar Islam, BJP national spokesperson, said exit polls reflect that voters “appreciated the BJP's governance model, welfare schemes and Prime Minister Modi's vision.”
“The ease of life has improved for people under Modi's leadership and that is why we expect a historic verdict,” he told Al Jazeera.
Five more years of BJP dominance?
Modi's re-election campaign was marked by scaremongering, with him and the BJP continually projecting the prime minister as a savior of the general Hindu population against an opposition conspiracy to benefit Muslims, whom he referred to as “infiltrators” and “those with more children” at campaign rallies.
With an estimated population of 200 million, India is home to the third largest Muslim community in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the opposition tried to corner Modi on issues of social justice and equality. That topic struck a chord with Vikrant Singh, a 21-year-old political science student.
Singh traveled more than 160 kilometers (100 miles) to return to his home in Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, to vote against the BJP, he said. “Public universities are becoming expensive and unemployment is rising,” he said. “I'm almost in graduate school and I have no job opportunities to look forward to.”
It is his first time voting, and for Indians his age, the past Congress government (the party was last in power between 2004 and 2014) is now a distant memory. And the future, she said, doesn't look promising.
“The main objective of the BJP has been to win elections rather than govern,” he said. “They seek cultural hegemony and capture young minds by controlling the media.”
In Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state, the BJP is expected to win more than 65 of 80 seats along with its allies, up from 62 in the last election. After the exit polls were released, Modi claimed that the opposition alliance “failed to strike a chord with voters.”
“Throughout the campaign, they only improved their expertise in one thing: attacking Modi. This regressive policy has been rejected by the people,” he wrote in X.
If the election results support the exit polls, Sircar noted that India expects to spend another five years “under the centralized coalition of Modi and Amit Shah,” referring to the country's home minister, who is widely regarded as measure the deputy prime minister.
“This BJP only knows that way of working: a government where power is completely centralized at the top.”
