AHMEDABAD: Exit polls universally forecast a sweeping, third term win for Chief Minister Narendra Modi as the two-phase assembly elections ended in Gujarat with a record 70 percent polling.
Although the official results will be declared only on Thursday, all exit polls predicted that Modi was set to lead the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a landslide victory.
The Ananda Bazar Patrika-Nielsen survey gave 116 of the total 182 seats to the BJP. The Congress was placed a distant second with 60 seats.
C voters (Centre for Voting Opinion and Trends in Election Research) agency said Modi could bag upto 124 seats. It put 54 seats in the Congress kitty.
The News 24 Today Chanakya poll predicted a much higher 140 seats for the BJP and 40 to the Congress.
A supremely confident Modi, who has ruled Gujarat since 2001, gave a broad smile and flashed a V-sign with both hands after casting his ballot in his constituency Maninagar.
“The people of Gujarat will vote the BJP to power for a third consecutive term,” he told the media triumphantly.
Long queues formed at polling stations yesterday with turnout nearly matching the 70 percent recorded in the first round of voting last week in Gujarat, one of India’s fastest-developing states. “It’s a very peaceful election,” Modi said after casting his vote in the state’s largest commercial city Ahmedabad. “It will be a historic (election) because it has been contested on the issue of good governance and development.”
Though Modi has never declared his ambition to be prime minister, he is widely thought to be angling to lead the BJP into national elections due in 2014. Modi’s links to some of the worst sectarian violence in post-independence India make him a hate-figure for many Muslims and secularists.
He is blamed by some rights groups for turning a blind eye to the 2002 unrest, during which as many as 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in an orgy of violence that saw victims set alight or hacked to death in the streets. “We have noted a huge turnout in the final phase of election. Over 10 million people have voted today,” a state election officer in Ahmedabad said.
Modi’s main rival in Gujarat is the Congress party, which heads the federal coalition government and is dominated by the Gandhi dynasty which has run India for most of its post-independence history.
If Modi wins the state polls with a big majority, he could project himself as a prime ministerial candidate - resulting in a potential showdown with Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Gandhi family, in the 2014 elections, analysts say. Results from the Gujarat elections are expected on December 20.
IANS/AFP
