New Delhi: As many as five exit polls conducted by leading agencies on Sunday projected that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is all set to retain power at the Centre, riding yet another “Narendra Modi wave”. This, despite the Congress-led Opposition making frenetic efforts to dent the Modi citadel by raising issues like corruption, unemployment, demonetisation and inflation.

Exit polls which predicted that the NDA will fall short of majority numbers were in a poor minority. The NDA may win 336 of the 542 seats for which voting was held in seven phases, an exit poll by CNN IBN-IPSOS predicted.

A survey by RepublicTV-C-Voter projected that the BJP-led alliance to win 287 seats and Republic-Jan Ki Baat predicted 305 seats, while another poll by News Nation gave 282-290 seats to the ruling alliance. The Times Now-VMR survey gave the NDA 306 seats.

The ABP-AC Nielsen survey was among the two exit polls that showed that the NDA may fall short of majority with with 267 seats and UPA 127. NewsX-Neta poll gave the NDA 242 and UPA 165.

A party or alliance needs 272 seats to win a majority. In 2014, the NDA had won 336 Lok Sabha seats, with the BJP alone winning 282 seats in a sweep credited to a Narendra Modi wave. The counting for the current parliamentary polls will be held on May 23.

Most exit polls hinted that the Congress led by Rahul Gandhi may improve its performance over the all-time low tally in 2014 of 44 seats — 58 for the alliance it leads — but is unlikely to come close to stopping Mr Modi’s poll juggernaut. A majority of exit polls pegged the Congress-led UPA’s seats between 82 and 132.

Mr Modi had made nati-onal security and fighting terror one of his key campaign points to blunt Opposition attacks on his handling of the economy. The PM also attempted to paint the Congress as corrupt and run down effort by Opposition parties to consolidate votes against the ruling NDA, calling them “power hungry”.

The exit polls were released after voting for the marathon seven-phase national elections ended at 6.30 pm on May 19.

An election exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they exit the polling stations. The survey was conducted after each round of voting starting from the first on 11 April. The EC, however, did not allow the exit poll outcome to be released till the last vote was cast in the seventh phase.

At the end of campaigning for the last phase of polling, Mr Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah had decl-ared that the BJP would win a clear majority on its own with 300-plus seats.

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