Election results 2024 for 542 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats have been released by the Election Commission of India. The Congress has won 99 seats and the BJP 240.

We're still awaiting the results for the Maharashtra Beed constituency, where the BJP's Pankaja Munde is trailing behind NCP (Sharad Pawar) candidate Bajrang Manohar Sonwane.

Although there are 543 members of the Lok Sabha, 542 seats were counted as the BJP's candidate from Surat, Mukesh Dalal, won the seat without a challenge.

Election results 2024
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to lead the government for a third term in a row, according to the results of the election that were announced early on Wednesday. This is despite the fact that the-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) suffered crushing losses in three states in the Hindi heartland, and the election was fiercely contested and widely perceived as a referendum on Modi's popularity.

A far cry from the 303 and 282 seats it had won in 2019 and 2014, respectively, to have a majority on its own, the BJP, whose candidates ran on the platform of Modi, won 240 seats, falling short of the 272 majority mark and requiring the support of allies in the party-led NDA for government formation.

The NDA passed the halfway point with the help of important allies N Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Nitish Kumar's JD(U), which took home 16 and 12 seats in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, respectively, as well as other alliance members.

The BJP's dominance in Rajasthan and Haryana was eroded by the Congress, which is a constituent of the opposition INDIA alliance, which gained 99 seats as opposed to 52 in 2019.

With 37 seats, the Samajwadi Party maintained the confidence of the INDIA bloc in Uttar Pradesh, while the Trinamool Congress (TMC), another important opposition party member, increased their 2019 tally of 22 seats to 29 in West Bengal. Twelve seats were gained by the BJP, which had won eighteen in the previous Lok Sabha elections.

The exit polls and the BJP-led NDA had anticipated a landslide victory, but that was not what the results showed.

The greatest democratic exercise in history was scheduled to take place in seven parts from April 19 to June 1 and involved the counting of over 640 million votes.

The biggest setback for BJP has come in Uttar Pradesh where despite so much development, the number of seats has reduced.

The most surprising seat among all these seats was Faizabad Ayodhya, where despite solving the 500-year-old issue of Ram Mandir, BJP had to face defeat from Samajwadi Party. Ayodhya Faizabad is the seat where a grand international airport and a state-of-the-art railway station was built by the BJP government.

Such a situation in this area, known as temple economy, is not acceptable to the election pundits.

There are also reports of internal conflicts within BJP where there were some differences between the Chief Minister of the state Yogi Adityanath ji and the Home Minister of the country Amit Shah regarding the distribution of seats.

Sources indicate that Yogi Adityanath submitted a list of 35 candidates for Uttar Pradesh, but top leaders in Delhi refused to grant them tickets, which may have contributed to the poor performance in the state.

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