Narendra Modi set for third term as Indian PM

India’s Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi looks set to win a third straight landslide election victory after a six-week general election.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets his supporters in Kolkata last week. Picture: AFP)

India’s Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi looks set to win a third straight landslide election victory after a six-week general election bedevilled by searing heatwaves.

Results will announced on Tuesday but Mr Modi’s victory has long been treated as a foregone conclusion by analysts, in large part due to his aggressive championing of India’s majority faith.

Exit polls showed he was well on track to triumph and the Prime Minister was certain he had prevailed, saying he was confident that “the people of India have voted in record numbers” to re-elect his government.

“They have seen our track ­record and the manner in which our work has brought about a qualitative change in the lives of the poor, marginalised and downtrodden,” he said on social media platform X.

An exit poll from CNN-News18 forecast Mr Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its coalition allies to win 355 seats, well above the 272 needed for a majority in the lower house. But such forecasts have proved unreliable in the past at capturing public sentiment in a country with nearly a billion eligible voters.

Polling officials arrive with electronic voting machines and other polling materials at a collection centre in Varanasi on Saturday. Picture: AFP

Varanasi is the spiritual capital of the Hindu faith, where devotees from around India come to cremate dead loved ones by the Ganges river.

It was one of the final cities to vote in India’s long election, and where public support for Mr Modi’s ever-closer alignment of religion and politics burns brightest.

Mr Modi presided over the ­inauguration this year of a grand temple to the deity Ram, built on the grounds of a centuries-old mosque in Ayodhya razed by Hindu zealots in 1992.

Construction of the temple fulfilled a longstanding demand of Hindu activists and was widely celebrated across the country with back-to-back television coverage and street parties. The ceremony, and many other chest-beating demonstrations of fidelity to India’s majority religion over the past decade, have left many among the country’s 200 million-plus minority Muslim community uneasy about their futures.

A woman sits outside a polling station in Varanasi on Saturday. Picture: AFP

The Prime Minister made several strident comments about Muslims on the campaign trail, referring to them as “infiltrators”. He had also accused the motley coalition of more than two dozen opposition parties contesting the poll against him of plotting to ­redistribute India’s wealth to its Muslim citizens.

Political analyst Ramu Manivannan said Saturday’s exit polls strongly indicated that Mr Modi would return to power.

But he cautioned that their forecasts were not definitive given a track record of predictions that ­diverged widely from final results.

Western democracies have largely sidestepped concerns over rights and democratic freedoms in the hopes of cultivating an ally that can help check the growing assertiveness of China, India’s northern neighbour and rival regional power.

India’s rising international clout – the country overtook Britain as the world’s fifth-biggest economy in 2022 – has also boosted Modi’s image at home.

“People now look at India and Indians with a lot more respect,” Shikha Aggarwal, 40, said while waiting to cast her vote.

India voted in seven phases over six weeks to ease the ­immense logistical burden of staging an election in the world’s most populous country.

Turnout was down several percentage points from the last national election in 2019, with analysts partly blaming heatwaves across northern India. Authorities said 10 poll workers had died of heatstroke in the eastern state of Bihar on Thursday while setting up for the vote.

AFP