NEW DELHI, 11 May 2004 — Exit polls predicted a hung Parliament as Indians voted in the fifth and final phase of the world’s largest democratic election yesterday. Doubts were raised over whether Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee will be returned to power with a stable government.
The massive ballot — involving some 368 million voters — took three weeks to conduct and could also decide the fate of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, with opposition leader Sonia Gandhi looking for solid gains and her son Rahul entering politics for the first time.
Although exit polls and voter surveys placed Vajpayee’s National Democratic Alliance far ahead of Gandhi’s opposition Congress party and its allies, most pollsters have predicted that the 11-party coalition will fall short of the 272-seat majority mark it needs in the lawmaking lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha.
The NDTV-Indian Express exit polls predicted 230-250 seats for NDA and 190-205 seats for Congress and its allies.
While Headlines Today television channel gave 248 seats to the ruling NDA alliance, the Star News projected 263-275 seats for it. Sahara Samay gave 263-278 seats to the NDA.
Headlines Today predicted 191 seats for the Congress party and its allies, while Star News gave it between 174 and 186 seats and Sahara Samay predicted 171-181 for it.
Other parties in the fray were given 86-96 seats by Star News, 104 by Headlines Today and 92-102 by Sahara Samay, all of them thus predicting that the most likely outcome will be a hung Parliament.
Some voters lined up in pouring rain in the Himalayas while others fainted from scorching heat in the east, as 16 states held balloting yesterday. Election-related violence claimed four lives in West Bengal and Punjab states.
Indian stocks and the rupee currency closed sharply lower over concerns of a hung Parliament, said Jayesh Shroff, fund manager at BOB Asset Management.
Both the benchmark index of the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Sensex, and the National Stock Exchange, the country’s largest, closed 2 percent lower.
