Indian Polls

Islamabad, May 24; PTI/GANASHAKTI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's re-election for a second five-year term drew a mixed response from the media in Pakistan with some calling it an emphatic mandate based on national security while others terming it a global trend of right-wing populists sweeping to victory.

Surprisingly the anti-Modi sting in the media was missing as for many outlets it was not an unexpected outcome of the elections.

Jaipur, May 24 (PTI) The BJP, which won 24 of the 25 Lok Sabha seats in Rajasthan where it had lost the 2018 assembly polls to the Congress, saw its vote share increase from 54.94 per cent in 2014 to 58.5 per cent in this general election.

The saffron party had contested on 24 seats and its ally Rastriya Loktantrik Party (RLP) on one seat, which it won.

Varanasi, May 23 (PTI) Prime Minister Narendra Modi Thursday won the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat defeating his nearest rival Shalini Yadav of Samajwadi Party by a margin of nearly 4.80 lakh votes.

Modi won the Varanasi seat by 4,79,505 votes, an Election Commission update on poll results said here.

In the 2014 general elections, Modi had won by a margin of 3,71,784 votes against his nearest rival, Aam Admi party supremo Arvind Kejariwal.

New Delhi, May 23 (PTI) Congress workers expected Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to turnaround the fortunes of the party in Uttar Pradesh with the swish of a magic wand, yet her combative and calculative campaign failed to lift the grand old party from the abyss of political irrelevance in the state.

Priyanka, 47, who was appointed AICC general secretary in-charge Uttar Pradesh (east) in January, did manage to create a buzz during the Lok Sabha polls, but failed to revive the party's hopes for the assembly elections scheduled for 2022.

New Delhi, May 24 (PTI) After a humiliating defeat in the Lok Sabha polls, top Congress leaders will deliberate on party losses at a meeting of the working committee slated on Saturday where party chief Rahul Gandhi is likely to offer his resignation.

According to sources, the party has convened a meeting of the Congress Working Committee, the highest decision making body of the party at 11 AM tomorrow.

Mumbai, May 23 (PTI) MNS chief Raj Thackeray, who had vociferously campaigned against the BJP, Thursday termed the Lok Sabha poll trends suggesting a landslide victory for the ruling party as "beyond rationale" and "incomprehensible".

"Beyond rationale! #Verdict2019," the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief tweeted.

In another post on the micro-blogging site, he said the results were "anakalniya" (incomprehensible).

Chennai, May 23 (PTI) Tamil Nadu Congress Committee president K S Alagiri Thursday said while Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won polls, "India has lost."

Congress party accepted the people's verdict, he said adding a victory for a "flawed ideology," was, however, a cause for concern.

NEW DELHI (AP) — The man in the saffron robe sat cross-legged with his eyes closed, back to the wall of a cave framed by the Himalayas.

This was India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest production, traveling to a remote mountain temple with a preferred TV news crew to show the world India’s leader meditating days before the end of the country’s marathon general elections. As official results Thursday showed Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party leading in the race for the lower house of Parliament, the party already declared victory.

New Delhi, May 22; PTI/GANASHAKTI: CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury on Wednesday said the Election Commission's rejection of the Opposition demand to first count the VVPAT slips went against the "spirit" of a Supreme Court order on the devices.

Yechury's reaction comes after the commission is learnt to have stuck to its plan to count the voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) slips in the end and not in the beginning as demanded by the Opposition.

New Delhi, May 22; GANASHAKTI: The Election Commission is learnt to have stuck to its plan of counting the paper trail machines slips at the end of counts and not in the beginning as demanded by opposition parties.

The Commission is also learnt to have decided to count postal ballots simultaneously with Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) count due to the "sheer size" of the ballots received this time from service voters.

Till now, the postal ballots were counted in the beginning followed by votes polled in voting machines.