International Desk: The counting of votes has started after the election activities that have been going on for more than a month and a half in India. The counting of votes started at 8 a.m. local time (8:30 a.m. Bangladesh time).
BJP or Congress, NDA Alliance or Opposition India Alliance—who will win this Lok Sabha election and form the new government will be known today.
According to media reports, the counting of votes began at 8 a.m. local time on Tuesday (June 4) after six weeks of marathon elections in India. Votes have been taken through electronic voting machines, or EVMs, which are expected to complete the counting of votes very quickly.
In this process, which is known as the biggest election in the world, about 1 billion people were voters, out of which 642 million people voted, according to the Election Commission of the country.
Voting has been held for the 543-seat Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. The party or coalition that gets 272 or more seats will form the next government in the country.
The election is contested mainly between two alliances: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP-led NDA, and the ‘India’ alliance, which comprises allies in the opposition Congress.
If the NDA wins, there is no doubt that Modi will become the prime minister for the third time in a row. But if the ‘India’ alliance wins, who will be the prime minister is still not sure. The opposition alliance did not present any leader as their ‘Prime Ministerial Candidate’ during the election campaign.
Meanwhile, after the 7-phase elections ended last Saturday, the exit polls, or booth-returned opinion polls, conducted by the media and polling agencies showed that the NDA would get a majority of seats. They said the NDA will either get 353 (65 percent) seats like last time or gain 10 percent more than that to achieve a two-thirds majority.
But almost every opposition party opposes the survey, saying it has no basis, and booth return polls or exit polls have been proven wrong many times in the past.
Five years ago, in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won 303 seats with 37.7 percent of the of the votes. In contrast, the Congress got 19.66 and only 52 seats. Many of the other groups remained confined to certain regions. For example, Trinamool Congress won 22 seats in West Bengal, DMK got 23 seats in Tamil Nadu, Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party got 23 seats in Andhra Pradesh, and Shiv Sena got 18 seats in Maharashtra.
Basically, in this election, the incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, the BJP-led alliance ‘NDA’, are fighting to come to power for the third consecutive time in the country. If the BJP’s goal succeeds, Narendra Modi will become the first person after independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to achieve the distinction of becoming the country’s prime minister for three consecutive terms.
On the other hand, the leaders of India, the main alliance of the opposition camp, are also hopeful that they will be able to achieve the majority required to form the government.
Mallikarjun Kharge, president of Congress, the largest party in the ‘India’ alliance, claimed after the polls were over that they expected their alliance to get 295 seats or thereabouts. At least 272 seats are required to form the government.
