Exit Polls 2019 Updates: Modi Likely To Return To Power, With Polls Predicting NDA Majority

Total Seats: 542

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to return to power with at least four exit polls predicting that BJP and its allies will win a majority of seats in India’s parliament, while others have indicated NDA to be the largest coalition.

The exit poll results may come as a surprise as a resurgent opposition was widely expected to make a dent in Modi's hopes for a second term. The election has largely been seen as a battle between opposition parties banding together to contest against Modi's BJP.

Still, exit polls are only an indicator, and have a patchy track record of predicting election winners. In 2004, most exit polls had wrongly predicted the NDA government to come to power. Similar. Even in 2009 exit polls gave UPA a slim lead over the NDA whereas the actual results saw a Congress-led alliance winning by a comfortable margin.

Who will get the people’s mandate and make it to Raisina Hill? That’s a question which will only be answered on May 23.

Total Seats: 14

Two pollsters predict BJP to emerge victorious in Jharkhand. Two other see Congress coming out with more seats in the state.

Total Seats: 11

The Hindi heartland state of Chhattisgarh may see the BJP return to power even as Congress makes a slight improvement to their 2014 tally. Again, the exit polls have suggested that the recent assembly election victory for Congress may not translate to a win in Lok Sabha.

Total Seats: 14

BJP and Congress are expected to go neck-and-neck in Assam with two exit poll suggesting a tough fight. However, one outlier suggest BJP may take the state with ease.

Congress spokesperson Salman Soz said he did not know why there was such a disparity between last year's assembly election in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and what the exit polls have indicated for the same states in the Lok Sabha. “Exit polls have a mixed record, one has to take this with a spoon of salt,” Soz told BloombergQuint. “In certain states we have divergent views on the results.”

On the other hand, BJP’s Sunil Deodhar noted that holding the seats they won in 2014 while winning “bonus” seats in West Bengal and Odisha is what worked in their favour. He said that the exit polls show that people want Modi to come back for a second term.

Experts BloombergQuint spoke to have suggested that the exit poll numbers indicate that Indians voted for a prime ministerial candidate instead of choosing a member of Parliament.

“The big picture is that there is a silent Modi wave 2.0. This election is more about choosing a prime minister than choosing a member of Parliament,” political strategist Amitabh Tiwari said. “And it clearly shows that the people have voted for the PM candidate. There was no other candidate for the opposition. So it has gone as planned for the BJP.”

Watch the full discussion here:

Total Seats: 7

BJP is expected to hold fort in Delhi, even as three exit polls have suggested Congress winning one seatfrom the region—something they failed to do in the 2014 Lok Sabha. Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party too may not be able to make a mark. In 2014, BJP had won all 7 seats in Delhi.

Total Seats: 21

Exit polls have indicated that the BJP will pull off an upset in Odisha where Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik's Biju Janata Dal was expected to retain power with a simple majority. BJD had won 20 seats in 2014, while BJP had one. However, three exit poll numbers show that they might not have it that easy this time around.

Total Seats: 40

BJP’s alliance with Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) proved to be a tough nut to crack for the Congress and Rashtriya Janata Dal. Trends from four exit polls indicate that BJP’s alliance will improve its tally in the state.

Ajay Bagga, Executive Chairman, OPC Asset Solution

“Exit polls are an indicator but not an Exact Reality . Given the range of exit Poll estimates point to a NDA government , markets will welcome this political continuity . We expect a gap up on Monday with Nifty rising around 200 points . Thereafter the markets will be sideways going into the May 23.”

Motilal Oswal, Chairman and Managing Director, Motilal Oswal Financial Services

“The exit results are better than the expectations. Markets will move up by 2-3 percent in next few days. I am quite optimistic at these levels. Investors should increase equity allocations.”

Andrew Holland, CEO, Avendus Capital

“Market will react positively with a 3-5 percent rise and the rupee to move towards 69-70. Reason being continuity if that is the case.”

Saurabh Mukherjea, Founder, Marcellus Investment Managers

“The market was working with the assumption that the NDA would need to ally with other parties to form the government. To the extent the exit polls are predicting an outright victory for the NDA, we could see a 5-10 percent rally in the coming weeks.”

Nilesh, MD, CEO, Envision Capital

“Exit polls are a huge boost for market sentiment. Till the result day, apprehension would be put to rest.”

Chakri Lokpriya, MD, CIO, TCG Advisory Services

“The Modi win means GST, IBC, NPA policy continuity vital for ensuing India economic recovery. Jump in! It’s uptick time. It’s Modi again!”

Vikas Khemani, Founder, Carnelian Capital Advisors

“This will comfort market as this assures continuity of policy and strength & stability of government. Markets were worried of implication of a weak coalition.”

Deepak Jasani, Head-Retail Research, HDFC Securities

“Most exit polls have predicted NDA to win the Loksabha elections with a good margin. This was partly discounted in the markets over the last few days. The street would like it even more if the BJP on its own gets a majority in the Lok Sabha. However going by the way the exit polls in the last two elections were off the mark from the actual numbers, the markets would get excited but not super excited. The Nifty could open on Monday with an up-gap of 90-150 points and later consolidate. Over the next three days it could then look up to corporate results and, or global developments.”

Total Seats: 80

India’s most populous state, and the most electorally important one, has thrown up contrasting numbers for different pollsters. One trend that seems to emerge: the grand alliance between Akhilesh Yadav's Samajwadi Party and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party may have just about done enough to keep Modi’s BJP out.

Total Seats: 25

BJP is set to sweep Rajasthan again even as last year’s assembly elections saw Congress winning the state due to anti-incumbency. The BJP had won all 25 seats in 2014.

Total seats: 42

West Bengal was expected to be a a tough contest with BJP leaders campaigning strongly in the region to wrest power from the ruling All India Trinamool Congress. While Mamata Banerjee's party is still expected to be the largest party in the state, BJP seems to have made a dent in her tally, according to four exit polls. TMC had won 34 seats in 2014.

Total seats: 48

Four exit polls have shown that the alliance of BJP and Shiv Sena will retain power in Maharashtra, although with fewer seats than in 2014.

Total seats: 28

Four exit polls have indicated a smooth ride for the BJP in Karnataka. In the assembly election last year, the Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) formed the government after a fiercely contested battle. There may be no such contest in the Lok Sabha polls.

Total seats: 26

Four exit polls have given a near clean sweep to the BJP in Gujarat. The Congress was expected to hurt BJP in Gujarat, especially after a strong show in the assembly elections. Trends from the state, though, suggest otherwise.

In roughly an hour exit poll numbers will crowd TV screens and social media feeds. But are they reliable enough to predict a winner? The track record for the last few Lok Sabha elections seems patchy.

Read the full story on The Quint

The overall voter turnout in the last phase of polling stood at 59.86 percent at 5 PM.

Follow live updates on the seventh phase of polling here.

A day before the last phase of polling, leaders of opposition parties stepped up efforts to cobble together a coalition, with Telugu Desam Party chief Chandrababu Naidu meeting Congress and Communist Party of India leaders.

Naidu met Congress President Rahul Gandhi and discussed with him the possibility of all opposition parties uniting and forging a joint opposition alliance. The Andhra Pradesh chief minister also met CPI leader G Sudhakar Reddy and D Raja over breakfast, asking them to "come together". Naidu also met Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar and Loktantrik Janata Dal leader Sharad Yadav.

The TDP chief has already held several rounds of discussions with various opposition leaders, including Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee, Aam Aadmi Party National Convener Arvind Kejriwal and Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury.

On Saturday, reports emerged election commissioner Ashok Lavasa has decided to recuse himself from meetings related to model code violations till he is not allowed to record his dissent.

In a strongly-worded letter to Arora on May 4, Lavasa is learnt to have said he is being forced to stay away from the meetings of the full commission since minority decisions are not being recorded. He is also learnt to have said his participation in the meeting is "meaningless" as his dissent remained unrecorded. Lavasa said his notes on the need for transparency have not been responded to, so he has decided to stay away from model code-related complaints.

Lavasa had dissented in some of the 11 decisions the poll panel took on complaints against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah for alleged model code violations.

Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora described the reports "unsavory" and "avoidable". He also said that in the last meeting of the commission on May 14, it was "unanimously" decided to form groups to deliberate issues which arose in the course of conduct of Lok Sabha elections.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi held what was supposed to be a press conference on Friday, his first in India after five years in power. However, journalists who showed up to ask questions to the leader of the world’s largest democracy found he wasn’t exactly answering them.

Instead, after giving some brief remarks, Modi sat silently as the powerful president of his Bharatiya Janata Party, Amit Shah, fielded questions from reporters -- even when they asked the questions directly to Modi.

Modi has been criticised by the opposition and critics for not holding a single real press conference in five years. He has preferred to speak to the nation via a state-broadcast radio show, interviews to select TV channels and newspapers and, in one case, an hour-long conversation with Bollywood star Akshay Kumar.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi said that there is no option other than to offer India a new economic model that reboots the economy from the current framework that was set out in 1991.

“You do need a new paradigm,” Gandhi told BloombergQuint’s Raghav Bahl and Sanjay Pugalia in an interview on the sidelines of a campaign rally in Solan, Himachal Pradesh. “We are faced with a tremendous challenge, as big as any we have ever faced, of a massive population, youth, and an inability to create jobs.”

Gandhi proposed making a two or three “global strategic bets” that should be “transformational”, along with working on deregulation.

Watch the full interview here

P. Chidambaram

The Bharatiya Janata Party is likely to drop 60 seats in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Haryana, Punjab, and Bihar, according to Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram.

“The Congress president has made it clear that where we can win in Uttar Pradesh, we will put in all our effort to defeat the BJP. Where we cannot win, we are going to help the gathbandhan,” Chidambaram said.

Ram Madhav

Ram Madhav, the national general secretary of BJP said the party will require the support of allies to form India’s next government. “If we get 271 seats on our own, we will be very happy,” Madhav said in an interview with Bloomberg News Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait. “With NDA we will have a comfortable majority,” he said referring to the National Democratic Alliance.

The party will make up expected losses in the north Indian states it swept in 2014 with new gains in the country’s remote northeast, as well as in the eastern states of West Bengal and Odisha, Madhav said.

Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor, the Congress candidate from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, is confident of winning his third straight election to return as a Member of Parliament. And he doesn’t expect the controversy over women being allowed to enter Sabarimala temple to have any impact.

Nitin Gadkari

The crisis in India’s agriculture sector is of a magnitude that can’t be fixed in the five years that the Narendra Modi government has been in power, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari told The Quint’s Editorial Director Sanjay Pugalia.

On the prospects of the BJP in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, Gadkari asserted that Narendra Modi will be prime minister again, and that the BJP will exceed its 2014 tally of 282 seats.

As the two-month-long polling exercise in India draws to a close, the countdown to who will make it to Raisina Hill has begun: the first of which is the highly anticipated exit polls.

At least six election research organisations will release their estimates for the Lok Sabha election outcome any time after 6:30 PM. Exit polls, while having a patchy track record in predicting election winners, are still very closely watched by stock market participants.

“This week there is an event that is able to produce long-term trends in the market and is the factor that sets the tone for wealth creation,” Mustafa Nadeem, chief executive officer, Epic Research, told the newswire PTI. “Political events like election results usually produce trends that last for years.”

The election was largely seen as a battle between opposition parties banding together to contest against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party. And that's how the campaigning was conducted, too.

BJP’s rallies were focused on issues of nationalism using the recent Balakot air strikes as a show of strength against neighbour Pakistan. The opposition, on the other hand, highlighted the Modi government's shortcomings.

BJP remains confident of securing a majority this time, too. Party chief Amit Shah said they are on course to secure over 300 seats. But a resurgent Congress is posing a threat. Rahul Gandhi, who has since 2014 revived a fading party, has said that BJP will be wiped out of the Lok Sabha. Other opposition party strongmen like Mamata Banerjee, Mayawati and MK Stalin have also said that the objective should be to ensure BJP doesn’t return to power.

But who will get the people’s mandate? That's a question which will only be answered on May 23.

Corrects an earlier version which showed ABP-CSDS data. It has been rectified to ABP-Nielsen.