India opposition cruises to landslide victory

Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi and his opposition Bharatiya Janata Party won a landslide victory in India, election results on Friday show, while the longdominant Congress Party suffered its worstever defeat at the polls.

It appeared the BJP would win 280 seats in the 543member lower house of parliament and become the first party to obtain an absolute majority since 1984.

For its part, the Congress Party’s NehruGandhi dynasty either had won or was leading races for just 45 seats, according to a vote count that began early Friday and will conclude by midafternoon.

“India has won,” Modi, who looks almost certain to be the country’s next prime minister, wrote on Twitter in his first reaction to the PJP’s landslide win.

Although the electoral results are not yet official, Congress which has ruled India for most of its postIndependence history has already accepted its defeat.

“We accept the mandate of the people and welcome it and accept our defeat,” Congress leader and a member of the upper house of parliament, Satyavrat Chaturvedi, was quoted as saying by the local IANS news agency.

Rahul Gandhi, who led the Congress’s campaign, took responsbility for the defeat, saying the party had done “pretty badly” and “as vice president I hold myself responsible.”

India’s outgoing prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said on Twitter that he telephoned Modi to congratulate him.

During his campaign, the longstanding chief minister of the northwestern state of Gujarat touted the strong growth in that region relative to India as a whole, which has experienced a recent sharp slowdown in GDP growth and high inflation.

Modi also benefited from corruption scandals that have racked the Congress Party.

A selfmade man who as a boy helped his father run a tea stand, Modi is nevertheless distrusted by many minorities in India for allegedly allowing the massacre of nearly a thousand Muslims during 2002 religious riots in Gujarat.

A record total of 551 million people, or 66.3 percent of the electorate, voted in India’s general elections, which were held over five weeks.