BJP fails to win single seat in Tamil Nadu despite Modi's push but shows hope for future

The BJP, however, improved its vote share to 11 percent as compared to 3.58% of votes.

The saffron party had fielded candidates including senior leaders in 23 seats that the state offered.

The BJP-led national coalition NDA has improved its vote share to 18.2%.

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

Though he hasn't won the seat, AIADMK's relegation to the third place in the seat has assumed significance.

In South Chennai too, BJP emerged as the runner-up as Tamilisai Soundararajan has pushed AIADMK candidate to third place.

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."

Lok Sabha election results

Prime Minister 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 Bharatiya Janata Party (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 291, a comfortable figure to run the government but at the mercy of regional parties like .

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.

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.