The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leads the vote trend
Preliminary results from India’s general election show that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is leading the vote trend in 236 seats in the 543-seat lower house of Parliament, or Lok Sabha, according to data. of the Election Commission of India (ECI). However, the margin of leadership is smaller than expected. With the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) leading, the BJP would stand at 282 seats. It should be noted that a political force requires 272 seats to win a majority, a result that the BJP comfortably achieved in 2019 with 303 seats.
Congress Party leads coalition of opposition parties
The same ECI data put the main opposition party, the Congress Party (INC), in the lead with 99 seats. The INC leads a coalition of opposition parties known as the Inclusive National Alliance for the Development of India, or simply INDIA, which leads by more than 200 seats. The ECI has not specified what percentage of votes have been counted, so the trend could change as the counting progresses.
BJP wins victory in Surat city
The ECI has so far only finalised the results for one constituency, in the city of Surat in the western state of Gujarat, Modi’s home state. The electoral authority has attributed the victory directly to the BJP, as it was the only party to have managed to compete in this region. The counting began at 8am with postal ballots, before continuing with the aggregation of votes on electronic machines, according to the ECI. This is the only phase of the electoral process that is being carried out simultaneously in this country of almost a billion voters, which required seven phases for voting, held between April 19 and June 1.
Impact on the economy and markets
The first provisional results of the general elections in India have generated uncertainty in the country’s main markets. The Sensex index, which groups the 30 companies with the largest capitalization of the Indian stock market, has registered a fall of 2.30% since the opening, while the Nifty index, which includes 50 Indian companies in 12 sectors, has fallen one 1.87%. However, it is important to highlight that both representatives of political parties and analysts agree that it is too early to draw definitive conclusions about the economic impact of the elections.
