Photo: Collected
The numbers have started coming in and five surveys show Prime Minister Narendra Modi returning to power for a third time in a row, several early exit polls showed, extending his decade in power atop the world's fastest-growing major economy.
The polls showed his Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance will win well more than the 272 seats needed for a majority in India's 543-seat lower house of parliament. More exit polls are set to be released throughout the evening on Saturday, and actual votes will be counted on June 4.
If the early trends continue, the results would give a boost to Indian financial markets, which had been volatile in recent weeks amid concern that low turnout figures and Modi's sharpened rhetoric indicated his party might struggle to win an outright majority as had been predicted for months. While exit polls in India are sometimes unreliable, they have largely predicted the overall outcome in the past three elections.
The polls were released after the last of India's nearly 1 billion registered voters finished casting their ballots in a grueling six-week-long election that was spread over seven voting phases.
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