India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi shows the Bharatiya Janata Party symbol during a roadshow as part of an election campaign, in Varanasi, India, May 13, 2024.NEW DELHI — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's alliance was winning a majority of seats in early vote counting trends in the general election on Tuesday , but well short of the landslide predicted in exit polls, TV channels showed.
TV channels showed BJP accounted for nearly 240 of the seats in which the NDA was leading, short of a majority on its own, compared to the 303 it won in 2019. "It's a fair assessment to say 400 at the moment certainly looks distant," BJP spokesperson Nalin Kohli told the India Today TV channel, referring to some projections that gave 400 seats to the NDA.
"The sharp drop in Nifty is because the results, although early trends, present a picture that is a lot different from what the exit polls had shown," said Siddhartha Khemka, head of retail research at Motilal Oswal Financial Services in Mumbai. More than 66 per cent of registered voters turned out, just one percentage point lower than the previous election in 2019, squashing pre-poll concerns that voters might shun a contest thought to be a foregone conclusion in Modi's favour.