BJP's growth story in Tamil Nadu despite a blank in tally of seats

Without the support of any major Dravidian players, the BJP has achieved 18.27% though it failed to open its account.

The BJP has fared best in the southern part of the state, which has 39 seats up for grabs.

The coalition has recorded 22.27% votes in southern Tamil Nadu.

In its stronghold Kanyakumari, former Union Minister Pon. Radhakrishnan polled 35.6% votes, the highest by a member of the coalition in the state.

The BJP has polled more than 30 percent votes in Tirunelveli and Ramanathapuram. In Madurai, the saffron party pushed AIADMK to the third position.

BJP polled over 20 percent votes in Chennai and BJP candidate Tamilisai Soundararajan received more than 2.9 lakh votes pushing AIADMK to the third place.

Among the weaker seats where BJP candidates didn't put up a good show are Virudhunagar, Dindigul and Thoothukudi.

BJP's candidate from Coimbatore, K Annamalai, who is also the party's state president, has emerged as the runner-up.

The BJP's performance was poor in Central Tamil Nadu, a stronghold of the state ruling party DMK.

After the result, Annamalai said as quoted by The New Indian Express, "Although the NDA candidates could not head to Parliament through this Lok Sabha election, we will double our work to get your recognition in the coming days.

"We are happy that people of Tamil Nadu have extended their support to the NDA for its continuance in state politics as an unavoidable force."

Modi 3.0 with a weaker mandate and strings

Narendra Modi on Tuesday returned for a rare third consecutive term in office with his allies, but fell short of an absolute majority for his BJP, in an election that gave a new lease of life to a Congress-led disparate Opposition bloc- INDIA-  as the anti-Modi union halted the saffron juggernaut to under 300.

Modi, who is set to be the second Prime Minister after Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to return to office for third consecutive term, had kickstarted the campaign for his BJP setting the target for 370 seats and 400 for the NDA alliance.

Quite contrary to the "Abki bar 400 par" or "400 plus seats this time" slogan, Modi's BJP failed to achieve the majority mark (272) on its own, paving way for a return of a coalition government trend after a decade.

In what would trigger the debate of anti-incumbency setting in, Modi's BJP could manage to get to 240 while NDA touched 293, a comfortable figure to run the government but at the mercy of regional parties like TDP, JDU.

As a slew of exit polls that gave a clear majority to Modi proved wrong, even in the win of the NDA, the celebrations are louder in the  INDIA Bloc after they bagged a higher than expected number of seats. The INDIA bloc has won 234 seats, offering a tough fight to the incumbent.

Though several political pundits, opinion and exit polls had almost written off the Opposition, Congress (99 seats) led INDIA comprising several key regional players in offering a close contest to the incumbent.