North States Election 2019 Vote Counting LIVE Results and Updates: After securing an unassailable lead over the UPA — the closest consolidated opponent NDA had in elections — Narendra Modi visited LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, BJP veteran and founding fathers who are now relegated to the sidelines owing to their advancing age. The Congress had criticised BJP for 'unceremoniously' sidelining the veteran leaders by not giving them a Lok Sabha ticket. Modi had put in an undeclared age bar of 75 within party rank and file to promote new blood in the BJP.
From the Mahagathbandhan in Bihar to the much touted SP-BSP combine in Uttar Pradesh to the Congress' alliance with NCP in Maharashtra in North-West India, most alliances forged with the sole agenda to keep the Bharatiya Janata Party out of power have failed miserably in elections.
Congress' Uttar Pradesh unit chief Raj Babbar has said he takes the moral responsibility for his party's poor show in state, offering to resign. The Congress hit its lowest point in state when it lost even the Gandhi pocket borough of Amethi to BJP's Smriti Irani. The party is now reduced to a single seat in state, that of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi.
BJP candidate Sanjeev Kumar Balyan won from the Muzaffarnagar Lok Sabha seat with a slim margin of 6,500 votes. He was fielded against Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) chief Ajit Singh.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi won the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat defeating his nearest rival Shalini Yadav of Samajwadi Party by a margin of nearly 4.80 lakh votes.
Performing much better than most poll pundits predicted, the Bharatiya Janata Party has swept through the Hindi Heartland. Winning Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh in a clean sweep while restricting Congress to a single in Maharashtra, Bihar and Jharkhand. Officially, the results for 505 of the 542 seats that went to poll, however, leads and treds establish that the NDA will mostly cross the 350, the BJP achieving a brute majority alone.
Bihar is leading the tally of voters opting for the None of The Above (NOTA) option while exercising their franchise in the 17th Lok Sabha polls.
Sitting BJP MPs Hema Malini and Anurag Thakur have retained their seats — Mathura and Hamirpur respectively.
Samajwadi Party leader and sitting MP Dimple Yadav is trailing in Kannauj constituency in Uttar Pradesh. Dimple Yadav is wife if former Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and daughter-in-law of Mulayam Singh Yadav. Kannauj is a Lok Sabha constituency in UP's Doab region. She was contesting against BJP's Subrat Pathak.
In both Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, Congress is leading on just one seat out of the total 25 and 29, respectively, while in Chhattisgarh, it is trailing on 9 seats out of the 11, according to the trends. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is leading on the remaining seats in the three states. The trends come as a surprise, especially in Chhattisgarh, where Congress had won 68 seats out of the 90 in the assembly polls. The BJP, which had ruled the state for 15 years, managed to win only 15.
Smriti Irani is leading by 9820 votes in Amethi. Rahul Gandhi trails. This is after the sixth round of counting.
BJP's Sakshi Maharaj is set to win from the Unnao Lok Sabha parliamentary constituency with at least 56 percent votes. He was also the sitting MP from the central UP seat.
Anticipating the party-led NDA's victory at the national level in the Lok Sabha elections as forecast by exit polls, the BJP in Uttar Pradesh is making preparations for celebrations on Thursday.
National Conference president Farooq Abdullah has won the Srinagar constituency with close to 50,000 votes, local reports said. PDP candidate Aga Mohsin got 20489 Votes while People's Conference candidate got 15718 Votes. The BJP managed to secure only 1,205 votes.
BJP's Smriti Irani leading with over 4300 votes from Amethi. The Congress right now is leading only in Rae Bareli from where Sonia Gandhi is contesting. In 2014, Congress had managed to save the Gandhi's pocket borough of Amethi and Rae Bareli but this time Smriti Irani is giving a tough fight to Rahul Gandhi.
Sensex hits 40,000 mark for the first ever time, rallies nearly 900 points and Nifty crossed 12,000 points as a win for Prime Minister Modi becomes more and more likely from early trends.
The Bharatiya Janata Party is ahead on all seats in Delhi. BJP is ahead by over 4,000 votes in West Delhi seat. Party candidate Parvesh Verma is leading over Congress party's Mahabal Mishra. In South Delhi, Ramesh Bidhuri (BJP) leading by 11,600 against Congress party's Vijender Singh and AAP's Raghav Chadha. North West Delhi BJP candidate Hans Raj Hans (BJP) leading by 11070 against Congress party's Rajesh Lilothia and AAP's senior leader Gugan Singh. In East Delhi, Gautam Gambhir is in lead over Congress' Arvindar Lovely, AAP's Atishi is at the third spot. Meanwhile, Meenakshi Lekhi is maintaining her lead in South Delhi.
Bharatiya Janata Party's Pragya Thakur is now leading from Bhopal against Digvijaya Singh with over 22,000 votes. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Alok Sanjar of BJP won in this seat by defeating the INC candidate by a margin of 3,70,696 votes which was 34.88% of the total votes polled in the constituency. BJP had a vote share of 67.19% in 2014 in the seat. There were a total of 28 contestants in 2014.
AAP's star campaigner and key candidate Atishi is trailing behind BJP's Gautam Gambhir in East Delhi.
In Madhya Pradesh, early leads suggest a Congress rout which had only recently won the Assembly election in state, putting an end to 15-year-rule of the BJP. The BJP is leading on 27 out of the 29 seats. Congress veteran Jyotiraditya Scindia is trailing from his bastion Guna, where he has remained undefeated until now. However, Kamal Nath's son Nakul Nath has held on to his early lead in Chhindwara till this point.
Sonia Gandhi is leading from Rae Bareli but with only around 800 votes. Meanwhile, Jaya Prada, who was trailing behind Azam Khan in Rampur in early trends, has now gained a lead.
Sadhvi Pragya Thakur is leading on Bhopal seat. She contested against Congress candidate and two-term former Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh Digvijaya Singh. A strong BJP bastion, Bhopal seat has been dominated by the saffron party for the last 30 years.
People's Democratic Party chief and former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister, Mehbooba Mufti is trailing behind Congress' Ghulam Ahmed Mir in Anantnag constituency.
The BJP is leading on 23 of 25 seats in Rajasthan while the Congress is ahead on four seats. The BJP had won all 25 seats in 2014 Lok Sabha election.
If early trends are anything to go by, Congress president Rahul Gandhi appears to be losing out to BJP's Smriti Irani in the Congress bastion Amethi. Another Congress veteran to be trailing in polls in Salman Khurshid who is trailing behind BJP's Mukesh Rajput.
News18 has reported that the counting has stopped in Amethi constituency due to a server failure. The technical fault is expected to be resolved shortly.
Amethi is one of the key constituencies, keenly watched today as Union Minister Smriti Irani has given a very tough fight to Congress' President and sitting MP Rahul Gandhi. The BJP has been saying that Rahul Gandhi has accepted defeat after he filed his nominations and contested from Wayanad, Kerala. It may also be mentioned that Smriti Irani has been visiting regularly in Amethi even before the elections were announced and had been doing very active politics.
Counting of votes began Thursday for all states in UTs in India, including the northern region comprising Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
Buoyed by exit polls predicting a sweeping victory for the BJP in Delhi, the party's unit here has already ordered delicacies like 'motichoor cakes' and 'kamal barfis', a day before counting of votes for the Lok Sabha polls on Thursday. Meanwhile, party candidates Ravi Kishan and Queen Ojha were photographed offering early morning prayers at their residence.
Delhi BJP president Manoj Tiwari, asserting the party's victory on all seven Lok sabha seats in the national capital, said 350-kg of fine quality "ladoos" have been ordered for celebrations at the central office on DDU Marg and the Delhi unit's office on Pant Marg.
The results of the Lok Sabha election will be known today (Thursday, 23 May) for northern states Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
The counting for all states is scheduled to begin at 8 am. Though trends will be available at regular intervals during the counting, results will be declared only after approval from the Election Commission.
After the end of counting, five randomly-selected Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips from each Assembly segment of that particular Lok Sabha seat would be matched with the electronic voting machines (EVMs).
Most of the exit polls have predicted that the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is on course to retain power at the Centre for a second term. However, the Opposition parties have trashed results of the exit polls, claiming that the BJP will suffer severe drubbing due to rising unemployment, farm distress and slowdown in the economy.
In Delhi, the fate of 164 candidates will be decided when the counting of votes takes place amid tight security. With VVPAT counting to be introduced in this Lok Sabha election, the results are likely to get delayed by five to six hours, Delhi Chief Electoral Officer Ranbir Singh had earlier said. Delhi has 70 Assembly constituencies and in all 350 VVPATs will be counted.
Thirty-nine companies of central forces have been deployed for the security of EVMs at 21 locations across Punjab. Three-tier security arrangement has been put in place at the counting centres, with the deployment of 39 companies of paramilitary forces.
In Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha, extra precaution is being taken in about a dozen sensitive districts and prohibitory orders have been imposed. Sources told PTI that the EC has already banned victory processions and warned that no laxity in compliance of orders would be tolerated.
On Tuesday, the Opposition had approached the EC to demand that the five random VVPATs in each Assembly segment be counted first so that if there is a problem or a mismatch, the entire slips can be counted from the beginning itself. However, the EC on Wednesday decided against making any last-minute changes to the way votes are to be tallied, drawing heavy criticism from the Opposition.
As the row over the EVM, Opposition workers at several places kept a tight vigil at strongrooms storing them.
The voting for the seven-phase Lok Sabha election was staggered between 11 April and 19 May during which around 67 percent of the nearly 900 million eligible people exercised their franchise to elect 542 members of the Lok Sabha from a total of 8,049 contestants.
In the 2014 election, the BJP won 282 seats while the Congress had suffered a severe drubbing getting an all-time low of 44 seats as against 206 it won in 2009.
