India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by the controversial Narendra Modi (63), is poised to form the country's next government, exit polls revealed today, hours after voting in the mammoth general elections ended.
Various exit polls, relayed on television news channels, pointed to a significant swing towards the BJP-led 26 party National Democratic Alliance in nine rounds of voting in which 551 million of 814 million eligible voters cast their ballot over a five-week period. Final results are due on Friday.
The exit polls gave the BJP-led alliance a 38 per cent share of the vote in India's first-past-the-post electoral system, handing it more than 272 seats in the 543-member parliament and ensuring its ascension to office. The ruling Congress Party, with about 26 per cent of the vote which equals about 115 seats, registered its worst ever performance, the polls revealed.
Political dynasty
If successful, Mr Modi will succeed two-term prime minister Manmohan Singh (82), whose Congress Party led by Rahul Gandhi (44), the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, has been besieged by corruption scandals, widespread mal-governance and boundless vacillation in decision making.
Indian elections, however, are hard to call due to the country’s diverse electorate and a complex parliamentary system in which local candidates and regional parties hold great sway. Pre-election opinion polls and post-voting exit polls both have a questionable record.
However, the exit polls were awaited anxiously across the country, fatigued by the seemingly unending electoral process and mounting uncertainty.
A possible BJP victory ahead of the exit poll results rallied India’s flailing stock market today to a record high in four years. So too, the Indian rupee, which had dropped by almost 25 per cent in value over the past six months against the US dollar, touched a nine-month high.
Overseas investors buoyed by the BJP's putative political ascent also continued with their fortnight-long buying spree of Indian stocks, boosting foreign exchange inflows after a long hiatus under Mr Singh's administration that witnessed the halving of India's gross domestic product to about 4.5 per cent.
Influence
Issues of economic development, employment creation, corruption and infrastructural formation jostled on the campaign trail alongsides the traditionally ingrained aspects of caste and community.
India’s predominantly Hindu community is directed largely by the rigid and unalterable caste system, an ancient hereditary class order that divides society into four general categories with thousands of complex and intricate sub-divisions.
The highest or priestly class is the Brahmins while the lowest, manual labourers are the Sudras. In between are the Kshatriyas or warriors and the Vaishyas or traders below them.
Existing outside the caste system are millions of Untouchables – who later came to be known as Dalits – whose voting population is assiduously wooed by all political parties.
Criminality also played a major role in the elections.
Crimes
According to the Association for Democratic Reforms, a civil society election watchdog group, 17 per cent of the 8,230 candidates faced criminal charges. Of these, 11 per cent were accused of serious crimes such as murder, kidnapping and rape.
However, political observers concur that the 2014 polls were like no previous elections, not only in the harnessing of technology and the social media, but in their political ferocity and the highly personalised acrimony on the campaign trail
Three-dimensional holograms, You Tube videos and Twitter were not the only weaponry deployed over nearly 10 weeks of campaigning; abuse and counter-abuse jostled for attention in equal measure in almost all political party arsenals.
Mr Modi’s blitzkrieg, however, dominated and overwhelmed the campaign trail where he repeatedly spouted his catchy mantra of “minimum government, maximum governance’ which, over weeks, acquired a certain resonance.
He successfully converted India’s complex parliamentary electoral system with multiple parties, a divided and challenging electorate and myriad cutting-edge and survival issues, into a presidential-style referendum.
He clocked over 300,000km over four months on the campaign trail addressing some 440 mammoth rallies across India, sleeping less than five hours daily and returning home every night to western Gujarat province of which he is the chief minister.He presided over nearly 5,200 events such as neighbourhood meetings and tete-a-tete's at corner teashops, reaching one in four voters.
