The counting of votes for the seven-phase Lok Sabha elections has begun, bringing the curtains down on a bitterly-fought contest.
The counting exercise is on in over 4,000 counting centres amid concerns raised by opposition parties over alleged tampering of EVMs. They have asked the Election Commission to ensure transparency in counting.
The voting was staggered between April 11 and May 19 in which around 67 per cent of the nearly 900 million eligible people exercised their franchise to elect 542 members of the Lok Sabha from a total of 8,049 contestants.
In the 2014 elections, the BJP won 282 seats while the Congress had suffered a severe drubbing getting an all-time low of 44 seats as against 206 it won in 2009.
Besides the general elections, results of Assembly elections for Odisha, Sikkim, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh will also be declared today.
Below are the LIVE updates:
9:02 am: DMK candidate Kanimozhi is leading in Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu.
9: 00 am: Initial trends show Congress president Rahul Gandhi is trailing in Amethi where he is up against BJP's Smriti Irani. He is leading in Wayanad, Kerala.
8:56 am: Congress candidate Shashi Tharoor is trailing in Thiruvananthapuram, according to initial trends.
8:52 am: Actress-turned-political and Congress candidate from Mumbai North seat is leading, according to initial trends.
8:51 am: CPI candidate Kanhaiya Kumar is trailing in Begusarai, Bihar. There is a three-way contest in the seat with BJP's Giriraj Singh and RJD's Tanveer Hassan.
8:50 am: UPA chairperson and former Congress president Sonia Gandhi is leading in Rae Bareli, Uttar Pradesh, according to initial trends.
8:50 am: In Rajasthan, BJP is leading in 4 seats, followed by the Congress in 3 seats
8:47 am: Former prime minister and JD(S) candidate HD Deve Gowda is leading from Tumkur seat in Karnataka, according to initial trends.
8:45 am: Sunny Deol, the BJP candidate for Gurdaspur, and Kirron Kher, the saffron party candidate for Chandigarh, are leading.
8:43 am: Cricketer-turned-political and BJP candidate from East Delhi constituency is leading, according to initial trends. He fought a pitched battle against AAP's Atishi.
8:42 am: Congress veteran Digvijaya Singh, who is contesting from Bhopal against BJP's Sadhvi Pragya, is trailing according to initial trends.
8:40: BJP candidate Hama Malini is leading from Mathura seat, according to initial trends.
8:35 am: Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav is leading in Mainpuri seat from Uttar Pradesh, according to initial trends.
8:30 am: BJP president Amit Shah is leading from Gandhinagar constituency in Gujarat, according to initial trends.
8: 25 am: BJP candidate from Amethi Smriti Irani is trailing according to the postal ballot trends. She is up against Congress president Rahul Gandhi who is also fighting from Wayanad in Kerala.
8:20 am: Home Minister Rajnath Singh is leading against the mahagathbandhan candidate Poonam Sinha in Lucknow, according to early postal ballot trends.
8: 10 am: Initial postal ballots trends show BJP leading on numerous seats across the country.
8:00 am: Counting for the Lok Sabha elections has begun at 8 am. As a practice, the postal ballots are counted first. Out of the 18 lakh registered voters, 16.49 lakh have sent their postal ballots to their respective returning officers as on May 17.
(Photo: ANI)
7:45 am: Visuals from outside a counting centre at Kalpetta, Wayanad. Congress president Rahul Gandhi is contesting from this Lok Sabha constituency besides from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, where BJP candidate Smriti Irani is also contesting.
(Photo: ANI)
7:40 am: The United States has said that it is confident in the fairness and integrity of the Indian elections and would work with whoever is the victor.
"I would say from the US perspective, we are very confident in the fairness and the integrity of the Indian elections, and we will obviously work with whoever is the victor and whatever the outcome is there," State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus told reporters during an off-camera gaggle in Washington.
7:30 am: "The results will be definitely in favour of Congress. We're expecting that Congress will win and form govt. Rahul Gandhi will be the PM. The fight in Delhi is between BJP and us," said Congress' Ajay Maken, who is contesting from New Delhi Lok Sabha seat and is up against BJP's Meenakshi Lekhi. In the previous Lok Sabha elections, the BJP swept the all the 7 seats riding on the Modi wave.
(Photo: ANI)
7: 20 am: Visuals outside counting centre in Kolkata. Elections in the state have been marred by sporadic violence with Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress and the BJP trading charges over the issue.
(Photo: ANI)
7: 15 am: I am sure we will win. I am confident I will be able to contribute to legislation and policy-making in this country: BJP's Bengaluru South candidate Tejasvi Surya
(Photo: ANI)
7:10 am: Visuals from outside a counting centre in Bhopal. Counting of votes to begin at 8 AM
(Photo: ANI)
6:10 am: Out of the 543 Lok Sabha seats, elections were held in 542 constituencies as the EC had cancelled polls to the Vellore constituency on the ground of excessive use of money power.
6:05 am: Election Commission officials said the voting percentage of 67.11 this time was the highest ever voter turnout in Indian parliamentary elections.
6:00 am: For the first time in Lok Sabha polls, the EC will tally vote count on Electronic Voting Machines with voter-verified paper audit trail slips in five polling stations in each assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency. It will effectively mean that out of nearly 10.3 lakh polling stations, the EVM-VVPAT matching will take place in 20,600 such stations. In case of a mismatch, the results based on paper slip count will be considered as final.