India's conservative Bharatiya Janata Party raced to a mammoth lead Friday as India began counting votes in a pivotal election to determine the country's next government.
Voters appeared to hand the Hindu nationalist party a mandate even more sweeping than suggested by exit polls released earlier this week. At midday, news organizations predicted that the BJP was close to winning the 272 seats needed for a parliamentary majority on its own, the first time a party has achieved that since 1984.
It was a rare electoral landslide in a fractious political system whose governments are usually formed by shaky coalitions, and it reflected a nationwide wave of support for the BJP's charismatic, controversial leader, Narendra Modi, who would become India's next prime minister.
"India has won!" Modi tweeted just after noon Indian time, and added a BJP slogan: "Good days are coming."
Modi, 63, for over a decade the chief executive of the western state of Gujarat, ran on a platform of efficient, pro-business governance that resonated with Indians fed up with corruption, rising food prices and flagging economic growth.
Voters shrugged off the less savory aspects of Modi's biography, including his alleged role in 2002 communal riots in his state that left at least 1,000 dead, mainly Muslims. In 2005, the United States denied Modi a visa due to allegations that he allowed the killings, but in recent months, as his ascension to India's top political job seemed to become inevitable, the State Department ended a decade-long boycott of Modi by sending the U.S. ambassador to New Delhi to meet with him.
Modi, who served in a hardline Hindu paramilitary organization before entering politics, has denied culpability in the riots and said that if elected, he would reach out to India's large Muslim minority.
By late morning, Modi's party was leading or had won in 279 seats, according to the Times of India, the leading national newspaper. With its coalition partners, it had catapulted over 300 seats in the 545-seat parliament, nearly double its showing in the last election.
The results were a devastating setback for the Indian National Congress, the party of the Jawaharlal Nehru-Indira Gandhi dynasty, which has led India for most of its post-independence history. The Congress party was on the cusp of its worst-ever electoral showing -- and its standard bearer, Gandhi's grandson Rahul, was not even certain to win a parliamentary seat; he was locked in a neck-and-neck race from the long-thought-safe constituency of Amethi.
"We accept our defeat," senior Congress leader Satyavrat Chaturvedi said.
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