A buoyant Congress, riding high on the Lok Sabha success after being written off in the blitzkrieg unleashed by the BJP behemoth, is confident of a resurgence with the Haryana and J&K results
Haryana, J&K Assembly Election Results Updates: The ruling BJP has crossed the majority mark in the Haryana assembly and is leading on 49 seats while the Congress is ahead on 36 in one of the biggest upsets for the Grand Old Party which had struck gold in the initial trends and looked set to return to power in the state after 10 years. [Follow Live Updates of the Haryana assembly election]
Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Saini, who had earlier in the day claimed that the BJP would sweep the state, said the party was ready to serve the people for the third term.
Several exit polls had predicted a Congress victory in Haryana which recorded a voter turnout of 67.90 per cent. Jubilant Congress workers who had gathered at the party headquarters as postal ballots were being counted and kick-started celebrations fell silent as subsequent rounds of counting gave an edge to the BJP. However, senior leaders such as Bhupinder Singh Hooda and Kumari Selja said they were still hopeful of a turnaround and would not lend much credence to trends.
Th party also lodged a formal complaint with the Election Commission over a purported delay in uploading the results on the website. “As you can imagine, this allows bad-faith actors to spin narratives that undermine the process. You can see examples of it already playing out on social media. Our fear is also that such narratives can then be used by these mala fide actors to influence processes where counting is still underway i.e. in most of the counting centres,” senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh wrote in the letter.
In the last assembly elections in Haryana in 2019, the BJP had won 40 seats, the Congress 31 and the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) 10. The BJP formed the government with the support of the JJP and Dushyant Chautala became the deputy chief minister. The post-poll alliance ended when Saini became the chief minister.
For the BJP, winning Haryana is crucial for optics as the party looks to better its Lok Sabha election performance where it won five of 10 seats after sweeping all of them in 2019.
JAMMU & KASHMIR
The Congress and National Conference Alliance stormed towards victory in the erstwhile state, with former chief minister Farooq Abdullah saying his son, Omar Abdullah, would be the chief minister after the historic victory.
These are the first elections in the erstwhile state after 2014 and since Article 370 was scrapped in August 2019. [Follow Live Updates of the J&K assembly results]
Trends uploaded by the Election Commission showed that the National Conference was leading in 41 while its ally Congress was ahead in 10 seats.
Commenting on the trends, NC vice-president Omar Abdullah asserted there should be no “fiddling” with the mandate of the people in Jammu and Kashmir. “Transparency should be there. Whatever happens should be done in a transparent manner. There should be no fiddling with the peoples’ mandate. If the mandate of the people is against the BJP, then the BJP should not indulge in any ‘jugaad’ (machinations) or something else,” Abdullah told reporters.
Prominent among those leading are Omar Abdullah, Pradesh Congress president Tariq Hameed Karra, AICC general secretary Ghulam Ahmad Mir, CPI(M) leader M Y Tarigami and BJP’s former minister Sham Lal Sharma and Devender Singh Rana.
The counting of votes began at 8 am at 28 counting centres for the 90 seats of Jammu and Kashmir assembly which went to polls in three phases.
