You can enable subtitles (captions) in the video player
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has swept to a crushing general election win in a historic victory for his Bharatiya Janata party. Many analysts predicted that Mr Modi would be forced to form a coalition government after a hard fought election campaign in which his opponents accused him of presiding over stagnating rural incomes and rising intolerance towards minorities.
But Mr Modi's BJP looks to have confounded sceptics by securing a significantly enlarged majority. Preliminary results on Thursday, with vote counting still under way, showed that the BJP was on course to win more than 300 of the 543 seats in the Indian parliament's lower house, up from 282 five years earlier.
Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Congress party, conceded defeat to Mr Modi after early indications showed his party would win little more than 50 seats. That is scarcely higher than the 44 seats it won in 2014, when it was turfed from power after a decade at the helm of coalition governments.
Frankly, today, it doesn't matter what I think went wrong. What matters is that the people of India have decided that Narendra Modi is going to be the prime minister. And as an Indian person, I fully respect that.
For Mr Modi, the result is a vindication of his claim to have put India's economy on a strong course with crackdowns on inflation and corruption and a strong emphasis on infrastructure investments. These policies have proved popular with investors as well as voters. Mumbai's benchmark Nifty stock index rose nearly 4 per cent on Monday after exit polls predicted a clear win for the government, and briefly reached a new record high on Thursday.
This election was the biggest in world history, with more than 600m people casting votes. Mr Modi must now turn his attention to the important challenges awaiting him in his second term, with economists warning of slowing momentum in recent months and concerns about the pace of job creation.
