NDA will win over 400 seats in Lok Sabha elections, Home Minister Amit Shah reiterates

The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) will cross 400 seats in the upcoming election for the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Indian Parliament), Home Minister Amit Shah asserted in a conversation with Rahul Joshi, Editor-in-Chief of Network 18, at the Rising Bharat Summit.

Shah also said that the NDA will improve its performance in Uttar Pradesh, increasing its tally from the 2019 election.

In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP-led NDA is projected to win 77 seats in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections 2024 with a 57% vote share, according to a News18 Opinion Poll. The poll added that the ruling alliance under PM Modi's leadership is on course for a hattrick of terms.

He's also confident that the alliances forged with local leaders will help the party's tally in Odisha and Bihar too.

He believes that voters would reinforce faith in the party for taking the Indian economy from the eleventh position (by size) during the Atal Behari Vajpayee's regime (1999-2004) to the fifth largest in the world now.

He listed the abrogation of Article 370 (which took away special status accorded to Jammu and Kashmir) the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and the construction of the Ram Temple, aboltion of triple talaq and the introduction of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in Uttarakhand as some of the government's key achievements in the last ten years.

According to Shah, violence in Kashmir, the north-eastern states and in the areas affected by the far-left Naxalites is down over 75% under the Modi administration.

The recent revelations from the data on the sale of electoral bonds revealed that the BJP was the biggest beneficiary of the funding mechanism that was held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of India.

"In my personal opinion, black money will return after the abolition of electoral bonds. Congress was against electoral bonds as they want to cut money back through cash donations,” Shah said lashing out at the opposition.

“They (Congress) used to take donations and deposit them in Swiss Bank. Rahul ji believes in building personal wealth," he added.

The party has come under fire from its rivals who allege that the incumbent government misused the state apparatus like the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to force donations to party. However, according to Shah, the government agencies acted solely on the merits of the case at hand not based on political motivations.

"They want a system that there should be no action on politicians. ₹51 crore seized from Mamata ji’s minister. ₹350 crore from Congress MP house. What do they think, people are not watching?" he added.