India Exit Polls Show Opposition BJP Scraping Majority
A right-wing opposition alliance led by Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party is set to scrape a majority in India's general election, a flurry of exit polls indicated Monday.
Four out the five exit polls published within hours of the end of voting in the world's biggest election showed the BJP and its partners in the National Democratic Alliance would reach the 272 threshold needed to form a majority coalition in the 543-seat parliament.
Headlines Today, CNN-IBN, CVoter and ABP forecast that the opposition alliance would get between 272 and 289 seats while the Times Now channel put the tally at 249.
An average of the polls gave the NDA just over 273 seats, meaning Modi will have to find new allies if he is to fulfill his pledge to have a stable government.
All the polls forecast massive losses for the ruling Congress party, predicting that its share of seats would fall to a record low of 78 after a lackluster campaign fronted by Rahul Gandhi.
The pollsters stressed that the margin of error made a firm prediction impossible and previous polls have proven inaccurate.
Even if Modi and his allies fall short of a majority, the projected results would represent a spectacular rise on the BJP's showing in the last election in 2009 when it won 116 seats against 206 for Congress.
Modi has already indicated that he is looking to find further allies among a host of regional parties which would give him a much more stable coalition, telling the Times Now television network last week that "the best way to run a country is to take everyone together".
Many analysts have forecast that Modi will seek to bring the Tamil Nadu-based AIADMK party into his coalition, with Times Now predicting that it is line to win 31 seats in the main southern state.
Source: Agence France Presse
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