The Bharatiya Janata Party will form its third government at the Centre in a row. The party won 240 seats, which is 32 short of a simple majority in the Lok Sabha. The Congress nearly doubled its 2019 seats tally as it won 99 seats. In 543 seats that went to polls, 15 Muslim candidates won the Lok Sabha polls, including former India cricketer Yusuf Pathan, who defeated Congress veteran Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury in Baharampur.
78 Muslim candidates were in the fray in the Lok Sabha polls. In the 2019 elections, 115 Muslim candidates contested.
Among the Muslim candidates that won the elections was Congress candidate Imran Masood, who won the Saharanpur seat by a massive margin of 64,542 votes.
Iqra Choudhary, a 29-year-old Samajwadi Party candidate from Kairana, defeated BJP's Pradeep Kumar by 69,116 votes.
Afzal Ansari won the Ghazipur seat.
AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi retained his Hyderabad seat by a margin of 3,38,087 votes, defeating BJP's Madhavi Latha Kompella.
In Ladakh, Independent candidate Mohammad Haneefa secured a victory by a margin of 27,862 votes while another Independent candidate Abdul Rashid Sheikh won Jammu and Kashmir's Baramulla seat by bagging 4.7 lakh votes.
In Uttar Pradesh, Samajwadi Party's Mohibbullah won the Rampur seat by securing 4,81,503 votes, while Zia Ur Rehman won in Sambhal by a margin of 1.2 lakh votes.
Mian Altaf Ahmad of the National Conference won in Jammu and Kashmir's Anantnag-Rajouri seat by 2,81,794 votes against former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti. In Srinagar NC candidate Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi secured 3,56,866 votes.
In West Bengal's Baharampur seat, first-time contender Yusuf Pathan beat Congress' leader in the Lok Sabha and six-time MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury by 85,022 votes.
The Congress-led INDIA bloc won over 231 seats. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance won 295 seats.
It will be for the first time that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will have to rely on the support of his allies to form a government.
In the 2014 and 2019 general elections, the BJP won 282 and 303 seats.
The INDIA bloc is reportedly sending overtures to NDA allies in the hope of mustering support to form a government.
Source: Hindustan Times