EVER unpredictable, Indian voters delivered their pentennial surprise on May 16th, when over 417m ballots were totted up. Reversing decades of decline, the Congress party had won the country’s month-long election, which ended on May 13th, by a bigger margin than its most enthusiastic cheer-leaders had dared dream of. Congress and its electoral allies won 261 of 543 available seats. With support from a few tiny regional parties and independents, they will have a majority in India’s 15th parliament. On May 20th India’s president, Pratibha Patil, therefore reappointed Manmohan Singh prime minister, making him the first prime minister to achieve this distinction at the end of a five-year term since India’s first, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Congress itself won 206 seats. This was the best result by any party since 1991, when the murder of Congress’s leader Rajiv Gandhi half way through the poll gave it a huge sympathy vote. The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Congress’s main rival, won 116 seats, its lowest tally for two decades. In a double boon for Sonia Gandhi, Congress’s leader and Rajiv’s widow (shown above with Mr Singh), Sri Lanka’s government on May 18th declared a final military victory against the Tamil Tiger rebels, her husband’s assassins (see article).
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