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Pollster brought to tears on air over error in election results
00:58 – Source: CNN
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi will serve a third term in office after India’s election authority confirmed the National Democratic Alliance coalition headed by his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party won the required 272 seats for a majority.
- However, the result was a stunning blow to Modi, who had triumphantly vowed to win a 400-seat supermajority in this year’s election – and romped to victory in the last two contests with a simple majority for the BJP, turning his Hindu nationalist right-wing party into an electoral juggernaut.
- India’s opposition, which had largely been written off in the polls and by many analysts, portrayed the result as a rejection of Modi’s divisive style.
- All 642 million votes cast during six weeks of the world’s biggest election, which ended on June 1, are being counted today. Votes are being tallied under an extreme heat wave that has killed dozens of people.
Our live coverage for the day has ended. Follow the latest India election news or read through the updates below.
The votes were counted Tuesday after the world’s largest election was held in India.
From April 19 to June 1, more than 640 million people cast their vote at polling stations from the high peaks of the Himalayas to the remote jungles of the west.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared victory on Tuesday – but his goal of winning an unassailable majority lay in tatters with early results showing voters reduced the extent of his party’s grip on power.
In less than a decade, Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani has upended India’s telecom sector and become a top player in sectors ranging from media to retail as chairman of India’s most valuable private company: Reliance Industries.
His ambition and breathless pace of expansion is matched by Gautam Adani, founder of the Adani group, who helms businesses ranging from ports and power to defense and aerospace.
Reliance Industries and the Adani Group are sprawling conglomerates worth over $200 billion each, with businesses in sectors ranging from fossil fuels and clean energy to media and technology.
Investors have been cheering the duo’s ability to adroitly bet on sectors prioritized for development by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
As a result, these three men — Modi, Ambani and Adani — are playing a fundamental role in shaping the economic superpower India will become in the coming decades.
The South Asian country is poised to become a 21st-century economic powerhouse, offering a real alternative to China for investors hunting for growth and manufacturers looking to reduce risks in their supply chains.
Worth $3.7 trillion in 2023, India is the world’s fifth largest economy, jumping four spots in the rankings during Modi’s decade in office and leapfrogging the United Kingdom.
Sustained expansion will push India higher up the ranks of the world’s biggest economies, with some observers forecasting the South Asian nation to become number three behind only the US and China by 2027.
Despite these successes, soaring youth unemployment and inequality remain stubbornly persistent problems. In 2022, the country ranked a lowly 147 on gross domestic product (GDP) per person, a measure of living standards, according to the World Bank.
To spur growth, the Modi government has begun a massive infrastructure transformation and heavily promoting digital connectivity — with Adani and Ambani becoming key allies.
Both tycoons are considered vocal champions of Modi, and prominent politicians from opposition parties in India have often questioned Modi’s ties with India’s super-rich.
Read the full analysis.
CNN’s Jessie Yeung contributed to this report from Mumbai.
India is one of the largest media markets in the world, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), with more than 20,000 daily newspapers across the country and about 450 privately owned channels dedicated to news, which broadcast in dozens of languages.
Yet despite its size and diversity, critics say the media industry is growing increasingly subservient to Modi’s government.
India fell 25 places on the Press Freedom Index between 2015 and 2023, to 161st place — below neighboring Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. In the latest index for this year it rose slightly to 159th place but remains below all neighbors except Bangladesh (165th).
“There has been a sharp deterioration in the status of media over the last 10 years,” Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) India representative Kunal Majumder told CNN, adding that this included imprisonment and invoking terror laws to criminalize journalists.
There has also been an uptick, it said, in the use of anti-terror laws — which allow for detention without trial or charge for up to 180 days — against reporters.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not taken a single solo press conference in his decade-long rule.
The government of the popular but divisive leader stands accused by opponents of suppressing media pluralism.
Modi critics fear further erosion of the protections afforded to India’s free press if he is elected.
More than 40% of India’s 1.4 billion people are under 25: a tech-savvy and mostly English-speaking labor force. Like millions of migrants, many of them are drawn to the country’s financial capital Mumbai, full of aspiration and ambition. And it’s stories like these that inspire them.
The tech developer: Growing up in the slums of Mumbai, Javed Khatri never used a smartphone or computer.
But unlike many children in the slums, he completed 10th grade – the first person in four generations of his family to do so – then studied computer science at an engineering college.
He is now building an online platform to connect tech firms with engineers. He moved his family out of the slum, and supports his parents. Both his siblings went to college and pursued their own careers.
None of this would have been possible a generation ago, he says.
The influencer: Apoorva Mukhija hadn’t planned to be a content creator, so after graduation she took a job with a tech firm in Bangalore, the southern city known as “India’s Silicon Valley.”
“Then one day I just woke up, realized … (my job) just didn’t pay as well as content did, and I hated living in that city,” Mukhija, 22, tells CNN from a pastel-pink couch at her new apartment in Mumbai, which she says is her “dream city.”
Her career has thrived, winning her recognition from local media and amassing 1.3 million Instagram followers.
The internet holds a wealth of opportunities for young Indians. The country’s influencer marketing industry is expected to be worth more than $281 million in 2024, according to consultancy EY India. Smartphones and social media are fueling this growth.
The shoemaker: At age 13, Jameel Shah ran away from his village in Bihar, India’s poorest state, where his father wasn’t earning enough from farming to send the kids to school.
In Mumbai, he saw an opportunity in the expensive imported dance shoes required for dance classes.
He took two samples back to the narrow alleys of Dharavi, a hub for leather and textile manufacturers. With their expertise, and his own experience working in bag and wallet factories, Shah began experimenting.
The business grew, attracting stylists and choreographers who redistributed the shoes to dance studios. And they even made it onto the big screen.
Almost two decades later, Shah Shoes has helped support his family. He’s bought a house for his parents and started an education center in his home village teaching literacy to those who can’t afford school.
A key tool was the rise of social media, particularly Facebook, helping him find customers – which Shah credited to Prime Minister Modi’s push for a “digital India.”
India’s armed forces, the world’s second-largest in terms of personnel, have made big improvements in their abilities under Prime Minister Narendra Modi — but face challenges no matter who wins the election, an analyst said.
Viraj Solanki, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the armed forces have centralized control under Modi while making improvements to joint operations based on the theater where forces are deployed, rather than what each service would like to do.
Those include setting up integrated battle groups along the country’s borders with China and Pakistan, Solanki said.
China, whose People’s Liberation Army is the world’s biggest military force, represents India’s biggest worry going forward, he said.
“India’s ‘military clout’ remains clearly below China’s” and can be expected to remain so, especially since Beijing’s defense budget is three times as large as New Delhi’s, Solanki added.
The Modi government has stepped up defense ties with the United States, Japan and Australia — members of the Quad partnership along with India — as a way to offset China’s advantages.
But Solanki said improvements to the Indian military are hamstrung by two key factors. More than half of its defense budget is spent on personnel and pensions, and much of its hardware is of Russian or Soviet origin, meaning spare parts and upgrades may be in short supply as Moscow’s war in Ukraine soaks up those resources.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was once shunned by the United States.
Denied a visa for “severe violations of religious freedom,” he was effectively banned from entering the country for nearly a decade.
But in the years since that ban was lifted, Modi has been progressively embraced by the White House.
While the US has positioned itself as a democratic protector in an increasingly populist and polarized era, it has seemingly turned a blind eye to New Delhi’s alleged human rights abuses at home — where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has come under scrutiny from rights groups and opposition lawmakers for its increasingly strident brand of Hindu nationalist politics and an ongoing crackdown on dissent.
Modi and India, the world’s largest democracy, are necessarily a lynchpin in Biden’s strategy in Asia. As the world’s most populous country, no major global challenge, from climate change to advances in technology, can be addressed without India’s buy-in, in Biden’s view.
Both New Delhi and Washington are becoming increasingly uneasy about Beijing’s growing military might, aggressive territorial claims on land and at sea, and growing economic influence over its smaller neighbors.
In an era of growing tensions between the US and China, there are few partners that Biden is more eager to cultivate.
India’s first general elections began in October 1951, four years after it gained independence from British rule, and soon after it became a republic in 1950.
The election lasted about four months and the Indian National Congress emerged victorious in February 1952.
Population boom: India then had a population of about 361 million people with 173 million registered electors.
Since then, the population has increased nearly four-fold to 1.429 billion, with more than five times the number of eligible voters, according to the Election Commission of India.
From paper to voting machines: In the first elections, Indians used paper ballots to cast their votes.
Electronic voting machines were first used in the state of Kerala in 1982. But because there was no law prescribing their use, the Supreme Court struck down that election. In 1989 laws were amended to allow the use of voting machines after consensus was reached.
In recent years, the validity of voting machines has again been questioned — this time by opposition parties that say they are being misused to favor the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — an allegation the BJP denies.
At 7 a.m., Rupali Rao Kilare starts getting ready for the day in the cramped home she shares with five family members.
Though the sun has long risen, some alleys remain pitch dark as she weaves through the slum where she lives in Mumbai’s Goregaon West neighborhood, its narrow walls wedged between tightly packed buildings that block the light.
Kilare, 22, must hurry to beat the crowds at the slum’s communal toilets, before taking a three-wheeled auto-rickshaw to her boss’ home for her cleaning shift.
Just 3 miles (about 5 kilometers) away in Goregaon East, Shreya Verma, 26, stirs awake in her air-conditioned bedroom, pulls back the curtains and takes in the view of greenery and high-rise buildings.
Throwing on a blazer and heels, she hops in an Uber to her marble-floored office at an international tech firm.
Though the two women are separated by only a few years in age and a 20-minute drive, their starkly different lives illustrate India’s deepening wealth divide – and the inequality that has empowered some to reach new heights alongside the country’s fast-growing economy, while others are left behind.
That inequality has come under particular scrutiny during India’s election.
Though Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been credited with advancing India’s $3.7 trillion economy and bringing the country closer to becoming a global superpower, India remains a largely impoverished nation and its wealth gap is more unequal than it was during British rule.
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has lost one of its most strategic strongholds, the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, dealing a massive blow to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his allies.
The opposition INDIA alliance won 43 out of 80 seats, results from the election commission show — a huge shock for a state that is known as a bastion for the BJP.
The bellwether state, also the country’s most populous, is home to about 200 million people, and is currently governed by a firebrand monk-turned-politician, Yogi Adityanath, whose controversial Hindu-first policies have polarized its people along religious lines.
Modi contested from the state, winning his seat in the constituency of Varanasi for the third time. Also known as India’s spiritual capital, it’s a city where tens of thousands of devotees come to pray and gain enlightenment.
But that the BJP has lost majority seats in the states will come as a big surprise for Modi and his right-wing party.
Located in the heart of the nation’s “Hindi belt” — the predominantly Hindi-speaking Indian states where support for Modi and the devotion of his followers is especially strong — it is a state that is often referred to as a litmus test for voter sentiment in India.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi enjoys bipartisan support among the majority of Indian Americans, according to Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The diaspora has long pushed for stronger ties between Washington and New Delhi and yearned to see India as a key global player, Vaishnav said. “They see their hopes for India bearing fruit under Modi,” he said.
As international firms look to diversify operations away from China, and the risk of tensions between Beijing and Washington, Modi is “going around the world, talking about how India is open for business again,” Vaishnav said.
While there are many policies that business and trade stakeholders are unhappy with, Vaishnav said, “the feeling is that the needle is pointed in the right direction. Business looks at the opposition and they feel it would be much worse for the bottom line.”
Despite this majority view, there is a “significant minority” — comprising non-Hindus and younger generations of Indian Americans born in the US — that is concerned about the decline in democracy and secularism in India, Vaishnav noted.
But two issues matter most to the Indian diaspora: economics, where they feel corruption is down and growth rates are good, and hard power foreign policy.
“We are in a dangerous, complicated world with an emerging conflict between US and China, and they want India to be more aligned with US, and more visible in all of our global fora: G20, UNSC, etc.,” Vaishnav said.
Read more about Modi and his opposition.
India’s election authority confirmed a victory for the coalition headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Modi gave a victory speech earlier at his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) headquarters.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance secured the majority needed with 272 seats. The final votes are still being tallied as the mammoth vote-counting operation draws to a close.
India is poised to become a 21st-century economic powerhouse, offering an alternative to China for investors and consumer brands hunting for growth and manufacturers looking to reduce supply chain risks.
Ties between China and the West are increasingly frayed, but India enjoys healthy relations with most major economies.
So, is the hype around India’s economy, which remains a largely impoverished country, justified?
Still very poor: India’s economy was worth $3.7 trillion in 2023, making it the world’s fifth largest, having jumped four spots in the rankings during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decade in office.
India’s economy grew by more than 8% in the fiscal year that ended in March, according to data published Friday.
But India could do much more to raise its gross domestic product (GDP) per person, a measure of living standards according to which it ranked a lowly 147 in 2022.
Building modern India: India is spending billions on building roads, ports, airports and railways. It added nearly 55,000 kilometers (around 35,000 miles) to its highway network, an increase of 60% in the overall length, between 2014 and 2023. And in recent years, the country has also built a range of tech infrastructure platforms.
Stock market superpower: The excitement around India’s growth potential is reflected in its stock market, which has been hitting record highs. The National Stock Exchange of India has overtaken both the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong Exchange to become the world’s sixth-largest bourse.
Humming factories: As international firms look to diversify their operations away from China, India has launched a program worth $26 billion to attract companies to set up manufacturing in 14 sectors.
Where are the jobs? If re-elected, Modi has to tackle the enormous challenge of creating hundreds of millions of jobs for a population that remains largely impoverished.
With an average age of 29 years, India has one of the youngest populations globally, but the country is not yet able to reap the potential economic benefits from its large, youthful population.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will need a coalition partner to form a government, but this may be challenging since Modi has centralized power both in the country – and in his own party, Neelanjan Sircar, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research told CNN from Singapore.
Sircar noted that many “red lines were crossed” by Modi, using state institutions against opposition leaders and the media.
He said that voters on the ground felt that “certain lines have been crossed,” even if they didn’t say so explicitly.
Born into poverty three years after India’s independence, Narendra Modi has ascended to the pinnacle of the nation’s political landscape.
Modi’s father Damordas was a “chaiwallah”, or tea seller, at the family’s local train station in the western state of Gujarat. Modi said he helped his father sell tea as the family struggled to make ends meet – which he said helped him understand the problems plaguing Indian society at the grassroots level.
Modi entered Indian politics at just 8 years old when he enrolled in classes at the local branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing organization that advocates for the supremacy of Hinduism in India. He joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a young man and worked his way up the ranks, becoming chief minister of the wealthy state of Gujarat.
He was first elected prime minister in 2014 with a roaring majority on a ticket of nationalism and development. While he is credited with implementing economic and social reforms, the BJP’s majoritarian policies have polarized the nation, dividing it across religious lines.
His reelection in 2019 signaled to many analysts that India was shifting away from its founding secular roots to a Hindu-first state, something that accelerated during Modi’s second term.
This year’s election is a pivotal moment in the nation’s post-independence era, with the outcome capable of shaping the country’s trajectory with Modi at its helm.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) campaign manifesto centers on job creation and anti-poverty and development programs, with a particular focus on women, the poor, young people and farmers.
Modi wants to turn India into a global manufacturing hub, continue its massive infrastructure transformation, and achieve energy independence by 2047.
Worth $3.7 trillion in 2023, India is the world’s fifth-largest economy, having jumped four spots in the rankings during his decade in office. Modi has pledged that India will have the world’s third-largest economy during a possible third term.
However, economic successes have been slow to trickle down to the country’s poorest and India’s gross domestic product (GDP) per person is ranked a lowly 147 in 2022, according to the World Bank.
Modi wants India to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council, will push to bid for the 2036 Summer Olympics and aims to land an astronaut on the moon, and has pledged to transform the country into a developed nation by 2047.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s victory speech chimed with the image that he has projected throughout his decade in power: confident and with no admission of any defeats.
Despite facing shock upsets in the election, Modi did not admit this as he spoke.
His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is on track to fall short of an outright majority and is set to form a coalition government with his allied parties to remain in power.
Still, Modi triumphantly declared that he would govern India for the next five years, promising an era of development and prosperity.
And he strategically spotlighted the coalition he now needs to form a government.
Preliminary figures from the Election Commission indicate the BJP is short of securing the 272 seats needed to win an outright majority in parliament, a stunning upset that leaves them reliant on longstanding allies to form a government.
Modi is set to form a government with the help of the NDA – securing him a third consecutive term — a landmark that makes him one of the most successful politicians in post-independence India.
Full results are expected in the coming hours, but current trends show they are nonetheless something of a personal blow to Modi, who had triumphantly vowed to win a 400-seat supermajority in this year’s election.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has declared victory in the country’s mammoth general election, but the vote count is ongoing.
As of 9.30 p.m. local time (12 p.m. ET), Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has secured at least 190 seats according to the Election Commission of India — well below the 400 seat supermajority it was hoping for.
Meanwhile, the National Congress Party has the second-largest majority, having so far won 73 seats.
Two seats had shocking results, with the BJP winning a seat in Kerala for the first time. BJP candidate Suresh Gopi won the seat of Thrissur with 412,338 votes. It had previously been run by the Left Democratic Front since 2016.
But the BJP also suffered a shock loss, conceding the seat of Faizabad where Modi inaugurated the controversial Ram Mandir temple in January.
Awadhesh Prasad from the opposition Samajwadi Party won there instead, in a massive shock for the ruling government whose building of the grand Hindu temple was a key campaign tool.
With early results indicating that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) may not win an outright majority, it will be reliant on its coalition partners to form a government.
Those partners include dozens of right-wing parties from the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a BJP-led group that has been in power since his first election in 2014.
Formed in 1998, the NDA was created as an antithesis to India’s main opposition, the Indian National Congress. It includes several regional parties, including the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena, which governs the western state of Maharashtra, and the Janata Dal (United), which has a presence in the country’s northeast.
Generally the parties skew right-wing, but not all are as openly Hindu nationalist, with a variety of policies and platforms. Some are very focused on local areas where they draw support.
The alliance’s chairmen included former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and co-founder of the BJP L. K. Advani.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has declared victory in the country’s mammoth general election, as votes continue to get counted.
Modi made the remarks in a speech at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) headquarters in New Delhi.
Supporters threw rose petals at the Indian leader as he made his way to the stage. Chants of “Modi! Modi! Modi!” reverberated through the crowd as Modi spoke.
Early results suggest that Modi’s BJP may have to rely on coalition partners to form a government. Those partners include dozens of parties from the NDA, a BJP-led group that has been in power since his first election in 2014.
Although final results are still outstanding, Modi’s alliance is on track to gain 272 seats, according to the Election Commission’s website, the minimum number required to form a government.
Full results are expected in the coming hours.