Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has already won a majority of the seats contested in the parliamentary elections due to end next week, putting him in a position to return to office for a third term.
The BJP will win a “historic mandate”, Modi said in an interview with The Economic Times, published on Thursday.
There’s a “clear signal from the people on the ground” that the party has crossed the majority mark by winning 272 out of 543 seats in the lower house of the parliament, he said.
Voting in the country of 1.4 billion is being carried out in seven phases that began on April 19 and will end on June 1, with results to be released on June 4. Modi had predicted the BJP and its allies would win more than 400 seats, up from about 350 in 2019. The ruling party on its own won 303 seats in the 2019 elections.
Modi said the BJP had made significant gains in the southern and eastern parts of the country. “This time, we will vastly improve our performance in states like Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, West Bengal and Odisha,” Modi told the newspaper.
India’s NSE Nifty 50 Index hit a fresh high in intraday trading on Thursday, with a gauge of 12 state-owned banks jumping 2%. Markets were also buoyed by the central bank’s announcement on Wednesday of a record $25-billion payout to the government.
The BJP faces an opposition alliance of more than 20 groups, which aims to topple Modi and the BJP. Opposition leaders like Akhilesh Yadav, who heads a regional party in Uttar Pradesh state, and Arvind Kejriwal, chief minister of Delhi, have said the BJP will fail to win a majority in the elections.
Speaking about the recent volatility in Indian financial markets — triggered by uncertainty about the BJP’s support — Modi said in the interview that his government had undertaken “maximum reforms and managed the economy with fiscal prudence”.
“I can say with confidence that on June 4, as BJP hits record numbers, the stock market will also hit new record highs,” he said.