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Bloomberg
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has swept to victory in a key state election with a resounding win that will allow his Bharatiya Janata Party to push forward with its economic reform agenda and enter the national polls in 2019 as favorites.
Modi’s BJP has won 227 seats in Uttar Pradesh’s 403-member assembly, according to the Election Commission of India, beating the incumbent Samajwadi Party and its coalition ally, the Congress Party, in the most politically important of five elections being called on Saturday. It was also leading in 82 other seats.
Modi tweeted that he was “overjoyed that BJP has received unprecedented support from all sections of society”.
The BJP is also set to form government in smaller state of Uttarakhand, while a ruling alliance of the BJP and another regional party were ousted from power in the agricultural state of Punjab. Ballot counting continued in Goa and Manipur. Analysts suggested a BJP victory in Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of 204 million people, would be a vote of confidence in Modi’s national leadership as well as his controversial move to invalidate 86 percent of India’s currency.
It is also a sign that Modi’s opposition, particularly the rival Congress Party, continues to be in disarray since the BJP came to power in the 2014 general elections with the largest majority in three decades. “This enhances his political capital,” said Ashok Malik, a distinguished fellow at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation think-tank. “It means he has that much policy room in the run-up to his re-election campaign in 2019.”