By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, May 23, 2019: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik on Thursday returned to power virtually with absolute majority.

Modi won a second term with an even bigger mandate of 303 seats with a virtual sweep across the Hindi heartland and opening new frontiers in West Bengal and Odisha. But Patnaik‘s BJD has swept the Assembly polls with more than 100 seats.

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Modi congratulated Patnaik for his party’s performance in the state Assembly elections. The BJD has won comfortably for a fifth straight term negating a Modi wave that is sweeping the country, with more than 100 seats in the assembly.

Patnaik, has won both the Assembly polls from Bijepur and his home turf Hinjili, with a huge margin.

“Congratulations to Naveen Babu for yet another victory in Odisha. Wishing him the very best for the next term,”

Patnaik called upon Modi over telephone and congratulated him for the spectacular victory of BJP led NDA in Lok Sabha polls.

The Congress was decimated for the second consecutive time, failing to open its account in as many as 17 States, with its party president Rahul Gandhi losing in the family bastion of Amethi.

The BJP won 63 of the 65 seats in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, the three States where it had lost the Assembly elections to the Congress just six months ago. The party is all set to make a clean sweep of all the seats in Delhi, Haryana, Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, while it had retained all but one seat in neighbouring Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

From the northern hills and plains to Karnataka in the South, where the BJP was set to win 23 of the 28 seats, and the new eastern frontier of West Bengal, where the BJP was set to make an impressive collection of 18 out of 42 seats, the BJP has decidedly shrugged off the tag of being a “north Indian party”.

The BJP was also set to form the government in Arunachal Pradesh, where the Assembly poll trends showed the ruling party leading in 30 of the 60 constituencies.

The victorious Prime Minister strode into the BJP headquarters, undeterred by the unseasonal rain in the Capital late in the evening, as a raucous mass of party workers greeted him with chants of “Modi, Modi”.

In an emotional 45-minute speech to the gathered supporters, Modi said he dedicated “every second of my day and every particle of my body to the nation”.

Modi described the “historic” election as a victory of the people and an event for the world to admire and applaud.

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“This is the biggest event in the democratic world. The import of this victory will be recognised across the globe. This was an election fought and won by the people of India. The sentiment of the people is a guarantee for the bright future of India. I congratulate all the victorious MPs, whichever party they belong to and whichever State they belong to. I congratulate the winners in the Assembly elections. The BJP is committed to the Constitution of India and federalism. I assure the winners in Assembly elections that the Centre is a party to progress of their States,” said the PM, tearing up and choking at least thrice during his speech.

In Uttar Pradesh, the combined arithmetic of the SP-BSP mahagathbandhan failed to breach the BJP’s stronghold, with the party set to win an impressive 62 seats and an overwhelming provisional vote share of 49.50 per cent, which was higher than the combined vote share of the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress, which stood at 43.6 per cent till late-evening counting trends on Wednesday.