Lok Sabha Election Results: BJP Leads but Falls Short of Majority

Lok Sabha Election Results: BJP Leads but Falls Short of Majority

New Delhi: Results for 542 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats have been announced by the Indian Election Commission. The Congress got 99 seats while the BJP won 240. 542 seats were counted, with the BJP's Mukesh Dalal winning the Surat seat without a challenge.

Results in the Beed constituency in Maharashtra are still to be announced, however Bajrang Manohar Sonwane, the NCP candidate, is leading Pankaja Munde, the BJP candidate.

Despite suffering severe defeats in three Hindi-dominated states, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) secured a majority in the Lok Sabha, paving the way for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to lead the government for a third term in office. Many people viewed the election as a vote on Modi's level of popularity.

With 240 seats gained, the BJP—whose candidates ran on Modi's behalf—fell short of a majority and would require the backing of partners in the NDA to assume government. Compared to the 303 and 282 seats the party won in 2019 and 2014, respectively, this represents a significant drop.

The NDA cleared the halfway point with the help of important allies like N Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which has 16 seats in Andhra Pradesh, and Nitish Kumar's JD(U), which has 12 seats in Bihar.

The opposition INDIA bloc's Congress increased its number of seats from 52 in 2019 to 99, reducing the BJP's majority in Rajasthan and Haryana.

With its 37 seats in Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party raised the spirits of the INDIA bloc, while the Trinamool Congress (TMC), another important opposition party, increased its number of seats in West Bengal to 29 from 22 in 2019. In West Bengal, the BJP, which had secured 18 seats in the previous Lok Sabha elections, was able to secure only 12 seats this time.

The BJP-led NDA had expected and exit polls had predicted a landslide victory, but that was not what happened.

This world's greatest democratic exercise took place over seven periods, from April 19 to June 4, with over 640 million votes counted.