Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party won by a crushing landslide in his home state, election results showed on Thursday, in a strong performance ahead of a national vote due in 2024.
In its best-ever performance in the western state of about 60 million people, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won at least 147 seats in Gujarat’s 182-seat legislature, up from 99, and was expected to win another nine once all votes were counted.
Modi campaigned hard in Gujarat, the state where he was chief minister for 12 years before becoming prime minister in 2014, and which voted on Dec. 1 and 5.
Photo: AFP
Thanking the people of Gujarat, Modi wrote on Twitter that he was “overcome with a lot of emotion” by the results.
“People blessed politics of development and at the same time expressed a desire that they want this to continue at a greater pace,” Modi wrote.
Modi was Gujarat chief minister in 2002, when about 1,000 people, most of them Muslim, were killed in one of the worst outbreaks of sectarian violence in post-independence India.
The once-mighty Indian National Congress (INC) party managed just 16 seats, its worst performance ever in the state.
The BJP also resisted a challenge from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which governs India’s capital, New Delhi, and Punjab State, and which was hoping to expand its reach. It won just five seats.
The BJP has ruled Gujarat continuously for 27 years, and the party and its allies head governments in 16 of India’s 28 states.
The deep-pocketed party with a strong social media operation pulled out all the stops in the campaign, fielding many new faces including a former INC activist, Hardik Patel, along with the wife of a star cricketer.
Political analyst Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay said that the result was all the more remarkable after 135 people died in a bridge collapse in Gujarat in October that was blamed on corruption.
Voters “see their welfare in Modi’s political security,” he said.
“This kind of result in Gujarat no doubt smoothens BJP’s path to 2024 [national elections].”
Earlier this year, the BJP scored a strong win in Uttar Pradesh to become the first party to win two back-to-back elections in India’s most populous state, which also sends the most members to the national parliament.
However, the BJP lost power to the INC in Himachal Pradesh, a small northern state of about 7 million people.
India’s next national elections are due in 2024 when Modi, 72, is expected to run for a third term.
Crowds in Bangladesh are flocking to snap photographs with an unlikely social media star — an albino buffalo with flowing blond hair nicknamed “Donald Trump” that is due to be sacrificed within days. Owner Zia Uddin Mridha, 38, said his brother named the 700kg bull over its flowing helmet of hair resembling the signature look of the US president. “My younger brother picked this name because of the buffalo’s extraordinary hair,” he said at his farm in Narayanganj, just outside the capital, Dhaka. Mridha said that a constant stream of curious visitors — social media fans, onlookers and children — have come throughout
It began as a satirical online project. Now millions of young people in India are flocking to it as an outlet for their frustration. A parody political party called the Cockroach Janta Party, with the insect as its symbol, has exploded across India’s social media by turning absurdist humor into protest. Memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction have flooded social media sites, where millions of users are embracing the cockroach — known for its ability to survive harsh conditions — as a tongue-in-cheek symbol of endurance. The online movement’s rise has been unusually rapid. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)
HOTTER: While Indians are accustomed to summer heat, climate change has caused northwestern India to warm faster than other parts of the country, an academic said Roads and markets have emptied during afternoons and some farmers have switched to nighttime work to avoid scorching temperatures as a heat wave grips large parts of India. The India Meteorological Department forecast maximum temperatures for yesterday of about 45°C in the capital, New Delhi, where authorities have opened temporary “cooling zones” to help people cope. The weather department warned that conditions would likely persist across several northern regions in the coming days, with temperatures staying well above seasonal averages. Authorities urged people to stay indoors during the hottest hours and take precautions against heat-related illnesses. India declares a heat wave whenever maximum temperatures
BIGGER ROLE: Beijing has said it maintains an impartial stance on the war in Ukraine, but by training Russian troops, China is far more involved than previously known China’s armed forces secretly trained about 200 Russian military personnel in China late last year, and some have since returned to fight in Ukraine, according to three European intelligence agencies and documents seen by Reuters. While China and Russia have held a number of joint military exercises since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Beijing has repeatedly said that it is neutral in the conflict and presents itself as a peace mediator. The covert training sessions, which predominantly focused on the use of drones, were outlined in a dual-language Russian-Chinese agreement signed by senior Russian and Chinese officers in Beijing on
RSS