Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling coalition appeared on course to a sweeping victory in an election for the local government of one India’s largest states, triumphing in a race that was scrutinized over a chaotic purging of voter lists.
According to initial results, Mr. Modi’s coalition was on a path to forming the government in Bihar, the country’s most impoverished state that is home to over 130 million people. As the counting reached the halfway point on Friday afternoon, the coalition was leading in around 200 of the assembly’s 243 seats, improving their previous standing by dozens of seats.
Opposition groups had vehemently protested a rushed exercise by election officials in the months before the election to clean up Bihar’s voter lists. More than four million names were dropped in a process that was marred by confusion and chaos. Similar exercises are set to be carried out in several other states.
The election commission and Mr. Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have rejected the claims, saying the exercise eliminated dead, duplicate and fake voters on the electoral roll.
Both Mr. Modi and Nitish Kumar, the longtime chief minister of Bihar from a local party that the B.J.P. is allied with, have built strong support among female voters. Mr. Kumar has introduced scholarships and entrepreneurship funds for women, and his ban on alcohol in the state has been popular among women, who blame the availability of liquor for exacerbating domestic violence.
The female turnout of over 71 percent was nearly 10 percentage points higher than the male turnout, according to the election commission.
Spokesmen for Mr. Modi’s ruling party attributed their coalition’s strong showing in the election to their building an expanded coalition this time around, and to voters’ trust in Mr. Modi’s direction for the country. They have also credited Mr. Kumar’s improvement of law and order in a state previously marred by gang violence, as well as his programs that focused on improving the lives of women.
“This is a victory for development, trust and stability,” the B.J.P.’s Bihar chapter said on X.
Just weeks before the election, the coalition government gave cash handouts of about $110 to millions of women in the state — an amount more than the state’s average per capita monthly income of around $70. The opposition cried foul, saying state resources gave Mr. Modi’s coalition unfair advantage.
Mr. Modi faced a setback in India’s general election last year, losing his parliamentary majority for the first time and needing the support of a coalition to return to power. Since then, B.J.P. has focused on shoring up its performance in several state elections, turning around fortunes even in places where polls suggested that voters were unhappy with the incumbent.
The opposition, which had long accused Mr. Modi of tilting the playing field in his favor, has launched a concerted campaign against the election commission, saying it is helping the ruling party in “vote theft.” Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Indian National Congress, has presented detailed accounts that he said show mass irregularities in several of the local elections.
In Haryana, bordering New Delhi, Mr. Gandhi said his coalition lost despite growing grievances against the sitting government. The difference was about 22,000 votes, he said, before claiming that hundreds of thousands of questionable votes had been cast in favor of the ruling party.
He flashed the photograph of a young woman on his screen during his presentation, saying that the same picture had appeared in the voting IDs of 22 votes cast across 10 booths, each time with a different name.
“She is a Brazilian model,” he said.
The state’s election officer, in a letter, responded to Mr. Gandhi, saying that the voter rolls were prepared in a transparent manner, and that he should lodge any complaints officially.
The exercise carried out in Bihar, called the Special Intensive Revision or S.I.R., is meant to clean up the voter lists of precisely such irregularities. It is now underway in nine other states, including three frontiers where the B.J.P.’s Hindu right has struggled to make inroads — including the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, as well as West Bengal.
The Bihar exercise came a year after a parliamentary election in which the state gave over two dozen crucial seats to Mr. Modi’s coalition, helping secure him a third term. The opposition argued that revising the voter list so drastically and so suddenly now meant one of two things — either Mr. Modi had won those seats based on a questionable electoral roll, or that his party was trying to influence the results of the state vote through mass disenfranchisement.
The election commission initially cut off 6.5 million people in a state where the seats in the previous election had been won with slim margins, saying about a third of the voters were dead and that the rest had moved elsewhere or had their names duplicated.
After the opposition sued the election commission, proving that several people who had been declared dead were alive, hundreds of thousands of people were returned to the voter lists.
Suhasini Raj contributed reporting
Mujib Mashal is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, helping to lead coverage of India and the diverse region around it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan.
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