Gujarat election results: How BJP trumped Congress on roller-coaster counting day

At 8 am sharp today, postal ballots across counting centres in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh were opened and a few minutes later, the first leads in the results of two states' high-stakes elections were released. The Bharatiya Janata Party, in power in Gujarat and in the opposition in Himachal, was off to a flying start, taking early leads over the Congress in several seats.

On TV and in the newsroom, senior anchors and editors, many of them burned by the experience during the Bihar Assembly election results, warned repeatedly that early election result trends, especially those of postal ballots, were to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The warnings continued as at around 8.30am, Electronic Voting Machines were unsealed and counting in the Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh assembly elections began in full flow. The BJP was still leading, both in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, as election results slowly trickled in.

The party, in fact, seem to be surging ahead of the Congress, especially in Gujarat, which was the state the entire country's attention was on, in part because this was the first election there since Prime Minister Narendra Modi left Gandhinagar for New Delhi in 2014 and also because this was where a Congress, led by an unusually assertive Rahul Gandhi, arguably gave the BJP a run for its money.

However, as the clocked ticked 9am and fresh trends of the Gujarat election results came in, those warnings seemed prudent - the Congress first swiftly reduced the gap between it and the BJP and then, by 9:10am, spectacularly overtook the ruling party in early leads.

The markets, which opened around the same time, reacted to the news coming out of Gujarat, with Sensex tanking as much as 800 points in early trade. The fact that all eyes were on Gujarat's election results and not Himachal Pradesh's was underscored by the detail that the markets reacted so even though the BJP was in pole position throughout in the hill state.

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By 10 am, however, the Congress seemed to have lost all hopes of causing, what analysts had earlier called, a political earthquake. The BJP regained whatever leads it had lost to the Grand Old Party an hour earlier and from that moment onwards, the Amit Shah-led party did not look back.

At 10:15 am, with the BJP comfortably crossing the halfway mark in the 182-seat Gujarat Assembly, India Today TV called the election BJP's. The Bharatiya Janata Party would be coming back to power for a sixth consecutive time in Gujarat.

Oh, and in case you were wondering what was happening Himachal Pradesh, the hill state, which has had a tradition of alternating between BJP- and Congress-led governments, was declared for Modi-Shah's party long before the Gujarat election result was sealed.

As of last updating this report and with final Gujarat election results still trickling in, the Bharatiya Janata Party looked set to match the predictions of the India Today-Axis My India exit poll.

The party had won or was leading in 105 seats while the Congress looked set to get around 70 seats in its kitty, according to the official Election Commission of India website. In the 68-member Himachal Pradesh assembly, the BJP had won or was leading in 40 seats and the Congress in 21.

Some of the other notable moments of the Gujarat assembly election results included CM Vijay Rupani winning from his Rajkot West constituency; much like the BJP, he had earlier suffered a brief scare when early trends saw him trailing behind Congress's Indranil Rajyaguru by as many as 8,000 votes.

Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani made an impressive debut, winning from Vadgam in Banaskantha district by 18,150 votes as an independent candidate.

As the day neared noon, it became clear that today's election results were all about the BJP, even though the party was likely to end up with fewer seats in the Gujarat Assembly than its current. And, this was evident in the body language displayed by PM Narendra Modi, who while entering Parliament broadly smiled at news cameras and flashed a victory symbol.

Complete Gujarat assembly election 2017 coverage