Congress Party wins India's national election

NEW DELHI — India's election took five weeks, cost hundreds of millions of dollars and involved 700 million eligible voters from the snow-capped Himalayas to the beaches of south India. But the wait was worth it for the ruling Congress Party alliance, which Saturday won a surprisingly strong showing at the polls.

In front of party headquarters in New Delhi, supporters set off fireworks and people danced in the streets, some carrying posters of party leader Sonia Gandhi, others singing "Jai Ho," from the "Slumdog Millionaire" soundtrack.

"I express my deep sense of gratitude to the people of the country for the massive mandate," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said.

Political analysts and exit pollsters were left a bit red-faced after predicting a tight race between Congress and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

State television said the Congress alliance was expected to get somewhere around 261 seats -- just short of the 272 needed for a parliamentary majority -- compared with 160 for the BJP alliance and 58 for a "Third Front" group made up of Communist and other smaller parties. But full results could take several days as Congress finalizes its coalition lineup.

Analysts said the results, coming on the heels of several years of economic growth, were a vote for policy continuity and a rejection of the BJP's divisive Hindu nationalist platform.

"This is good for Indian democracy and good for secularism," analyst Amulya Ganguli said.

The strong showing should reduce pressure on the government to roll back economic reforms and weaken the India-U.S. nuclear agreement, a cornerstone of closer ties with Washington, D.C. That pressure had come from left-leaning parties, including India's traditionally strong Communist Party, which lost ground.

Under the deal, negotiated by the Bush administration and passed by the U.S. Congress last year, the U.S. agreed to share civilian nuclear technology.

Congress and its key allies held their own in traditional strongholds such as Delhi, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, analysts said.

And they managed to gain ground in traditional BJP and Third Front stronghold states, including Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, West Bengal and even to some extent Orissa and Gujarat.

"It's good to see that Congress won," said Farooq Khan, 32, a betel-nut seller in New Delhi. "I didn't open the shop today because I was glued to the television watching the election results."