India election results: Big wins, losses and surprises

A tight Varanasi race and BJP’s Maharashtra downfall – here’s how India’s 2024 Lok Sabha polls defied expectations.

As India’s election results become clearer, with hundreds of millions of votes counted and leads solidifying on most of the country’s 543 seats, the world’s — and history’s — largest democratic exercise appears to have thrown up some big surprises.

As counting progressed on Tuesday, the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi looked likely to fall short of the 272-seat mark that signifies a majority in the 543-member Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament. With its allies, the BJP was still projected to win a majority. The opposition INDIA alliance, led by the Congress party, was projected to win more than 200 seats.

These numbers contrast sharply with 2019, when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won 353 seats, 303 of which were bagged by the BJP alone.

At the heart of this shift was a series of political tremors that appear to have reshaped India’s political landscape.

Al Jazeera tracks some of the biggest surprises and upsets, as they unfold, from the vote count.

Uttar Pradesh, a state governed by the BJP since 2017, has a total of 80 parliamentary constituencies. Being India’s most populous state with more than 240 million people, it holds the key to determining who governs in New Delhi. Moreover, both Modi and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi are contesting elections from different constituencies in the state.

In 2019, the NDA won 64 seats of which the BJP alone grabbed 62. The Congress won only one seat; the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) won 10 and the Samajwadi Party (SP) won five.

But the 2024 outcome looks very different. As of 4pm (10:30 GMT), the SP