NEW DELHI, June 5: The Election Commission of India on Wednesday has declared results for 542 of the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies, with the BJP winning 240 seats and the Congress 99.
The result for the Beed constituency in Maharashtra — where the NCP (Sharad Pawar) candidate Bajrang Manohar Sonwane is leading the BJP’s Pankaja Munde by over 6,000 votes — is still to be officially announced.
While the Lok Sabha has 543 members, counting was held for 542 seats after the BJP’s Mukesh Dalal was elected unopposed from Surat in Gujarat.
According to the results declared early on Wednesday, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) getting a majority in the Lok Sabha, notwithstanding crushing losses in three Hindi heartland states after a bitterly fought election that was projected as a referendum on his popularity.
The BJP, whose candidates contested in the name of Modi, won in 240 seats, falling short of the 272 majority mark and needing the support of allies in the party-led NDA for government formation, a far cry from the 303 and 282 seats it had won in 2019 and 2014, respectively, to have a majority on its own.
With support from key allies N Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), which won 16 and 12 seats in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, respectively, and other alliance partners, the NDA crossed the halfway mark.
The Congress, which is part of the opposition INDIA bloc, won 99 seats compared to 52 it won in 2019, eating into the BJP’s share in Rajasthan and Haryana. As the Samajwadi Party kept the INDIA bloc’s morale high in Uttar Pradesh with 37 seats, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), another key member of the opposition alliance, won 29 seats in West Bengal, higher than its 2019 tally of 22. The BJP, which had won 18 seats in the last Lok Sabha elections, came down to 12 seats this time, helped by the CPM in many of the constituencies where the TMC’s INDIA alliance partner polled more votes than the victory margin of the BJP nominee.
The results did not throw up a landslide victory the BJP-led NDA had hoped for and what was projected by the exit polls. More than 640 million votes were counted in the world’s largest democratic exercise, conducted from April 19 to June 1 in seven phases.
Several of the BJP heavyweights and ministers in the outgoing Narendra Modi were defeated in the 2024 elections. Ms Smriti Irani, Arjun Munda and Ajay Mishra Teni, among others, were unseated in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. These losses, particularly in the Hindi heartland, have forced the BJP to lean on its NDA partners to form the government.
One of the most high-profile defeats was that of Smriti Irani in Amethi. Ms Irani, who had famously defeated Rahul Gandhi in 2019, lost to Congress candidate Kishori Lal Sharma by a margin of 1,67,196 votes. This defeat marked the end of an era in Amethi, which had briefly been a BJP bastion under Ms Irani’s stewardship.
The Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Ajay Mishra Teni who was embroiled in the controversial Lakhimpur Kheri incident in which his son trampled to death four farmers under his luxury car wheels, was defeated by the Samajwadi Party’s Utkarsh Verma by over 34,329 votes.
The Union Tribal Affairs Minister Arjun Munda faced a crushing defeat in Jharkhand’s Khunti constituency, losing to Congress candidate Kalicharan Munda by 1,49,675 votes.
In Rajasthan’s Barmer, Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, Kailash Choudhary finished third, trailing by 4.48 lakh votes behind the victorious Ummeda Ram Beniwal of the Congress.
In Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram, the Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, lost to Congress stalwart Shashi Tharoor by over 16,077 votes.
The BJP’s setbacks weren’t limited to these prominent figures. Ministers such as Mahendra Nath Pandey, Kaushal Kishore, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Sanjeev Balyan, Rao Saheb Danve, RK Singh, V Muraleedharan, L Murugan, Subhas Sarkar and Nishith Pramanik also faced defeats in the polls.
Mahendra Nath Pandey, the Union Minister of Heavy Industries lost his Chandauli seat in Uttar Pradesh. Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs, Kaushal Kishore lost against Samajwadi Party’s RK Chaudhary by 70,292 votes in Mohanlalganj.
Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, the Union Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food, and Public Distribution, lost in UP’s Fatehpur. Rao Saheb Danve, the Minister of State for Railways, lost the Jalna seat in Maharashtra to Congress’ Kalyan Vaijnath Rao Kale. Cabinet Minister RK Singh lost to CPI(ML)’s Sudama Prasad in Bihar’s Arrah.
Union Minister Sanjeev Balyan was defeated in the Muzaffarnagar Lok Sabha seat by Samajwadi Party’s Harendra Singh Malik by a margin of over 24,000 votes.
V Muraleedharan, the Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Parliamentary Affairs, was defeated in Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram. L Murugan, the Minister of State for Fisheries, Animal Husbandry, and Dairying, lost to DMK’s A Raja in Tamil Nadu’s Nilgiris by a substantial margin of 2,40,585 votes.
Nishith Pramanik, the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, lost the Cooch Behar seat in West Bengal to TMC’s Jagadish Chandra Basunia by over 39,000 votes, while Minister of State for Education Subhas Sarkar was defeated by Trinamool Congress candidate Arup Chakraborty in the Bankura Lok Sabha seat of West Bengal by a margin of 32,778 votes.
(Manas Dasgupta)