Celebrations started outside the Congress head office in Delhi early Tuesday morning, much before the counting of votes began for state elections in Jammu and Kashmir and Haryana. The Bhupinder Hooda-led Congress is confident of returning to power in Haryana and expects an impressive show by the INDIA alliance in Jammu and Kashmir.

Congress supporters, holding flags, were seen dancing to the beats of dhol outside their Delhi office. Some burst firecrackers and some even blew conches to mark the beginning of counting of votes.

The early leads suggest the Congress is ahead in Haryana and the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir.

Follow Assembly Election Results 2024 LIVE

In Haryana, former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda is trying to wrest control from the BJP after 10 years of ML Khattar and Nayab Singh Saini governments. His supporters in

“The BJP will go and Congress will come to power with over 75 (out of 90) seats. The BJP has always stayed away from truth and never fulfilled their promises,” said the supporters of Mr Hooda, who had gathered outside his house in Rohtak.

Read | “Tremendous Development In Last 10 Years”: Haryana Chief Minister On Counting Day

They claim Mr Hooda is ahead in line to become Chief Minister again once the Congress returns to power.

The Congress went all out in its campaign in the state, attacking the BJP government over issues like unemployment, Agniveer scheme, and an alleged lack of development.

The party also did intense campaigning in Jammu and Kashmir with Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi addressing several rallies in the Union territory.

Counting for the 2024 Jammu and Kashmir Assembly election – the first since Article 370 was scrapped in August 2019 and the first since 2014 – began 8 am.

In early leads, the Congress-National Conference alliance has taken a commanding lead  in what was to supposed to be a tight race. At 9.10 am the Congress-NC is ahead in 48 seats and the BJP in 26.

Within the Congress-NC alliance the former party is leading in 12 of the 39 seats it is contesting, while the latter, which has fielded candidates for 56 seats, is ahead in 35.

The People’s Democratic Party of ex Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti – whose party allied with the BJP after the 2014 election but fell apart by 2018 – is leading in eight.

Independent candidates are in pole position in two seats.

The race to control the former state’s 95 Assembly seats – of which five have been nominated by Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha in a controversial move – is predicted to be a close one.

Exit polls have given the Congress-NC alliance a slight edge. An aggregate of three indicates the Congress-NC will win 43 seats and the BJP 26, with the PDP winning between four and 12.

Exit polls, therefore, predict a hung Assembly; the J&K Assembly has 90 elected seats with the majority set at 46. Should exit polls – and they often get it wrong – hold true, the PDP could be the ‘kingmaker’ for the Congress-NC, but not for the BJP, which will also need support from non-aligned lawmakers.

It is with this in mind that NC leaders Farooq Abdullah and his son, Omar Abdullah, and the Congress, as well as the PDP, have criticised the Lieutenant Governor’s move to nominate five members.

READ | J&K LG’s Power To Nominate MLAs Sparks Row Before Poll Results

“This is an assault on democracy… and fundamental principles of the Constitution,” senior J&K Congress Ravinder Sharma said. The NC and PDP slammed the “subversion of the people’s mandate”.

The power to nominate was granted after the Delimitation Commission increased the number of seats in J&K. The five will include two women, two Kashmiri Pandits, and a displaced person from Pakistan Occupied Kashmir – to the Legislative Assembly, increasing the total number of seats to 95. 

The PDP, at this time, has ruled out a re-run of its 2019 alliance with the BJP, insisting it will only consider a ‘secular alliance’. That, inevitably, sparked talk of aligning with the Congress-NC combine.

READ | “Why Not?” Farooq Abdullah On Post-Poll Alliance, PDP Says…

Last night NC patriarch Farooq Abdullah said “why not” when asked about the PDP as an ally, although that party’s senior leader, Iltija Mufti, quickly called such speculation “unnecessary”.

Voting for this election took place over three phases – on September 18, September 25, and October 1.

NDTV is now available on WhatsApp channels. Click on the link to get all the latest updates from NDTV on your chat.

Leads for Haryana have begun coming in and they show that the Congress is likely to form a government in the state after a gap of 10 years. As of 9.15 am, the Congress is ahead in 51 of the state’s 90 Assembly constituencies while the BJP is leading in 33.

An aggregate of seven exit polls predicted that the Congress will win 55 seats, comfortably over the halfway mark of 45, while the BJP will emerge victorious in 26. 

While celebrations began outside the Congress headquarters in New Delhi even before the counting started, with party supporters dancing as dhols were being played, Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini expressed confidence that the BJP will form the government in Haryana for the third straight time. 

“We have done a lot of development work in the past 10 years. The kind of system set up by former Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar will continue to bring benefits for Haryana for a long time. It is our responsibility to take this good work forward,” Mr Saini, who took over as the chief minister from Mr Khattar in March, told reporters this morning. 

In the last assembly elections in Haryana in 2019, the BJP had won 40 seats, the Congress 31 and the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) 10. The BJP formed the government with the support of the JJP and Dushyant Chautala became the deputy chief minister. The post-poll alliance ended when Mr Saini became the chief minister. 

The BJP won only five of the state’s 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana after sweeping all of them in 2019 and the Assembly elections in the state as well as Jammu and Kashmir are an opportunity for the party to prove that it remains popular with voters after failing – for the first time in 10 years – to achieve a majority on its own in the general elections.

For the Congress, the stakes are arguably even higher because the party had been nearly written off after its massive defeats in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Congress leaders have been citing the party’s haul of 99 seats in this year’s general elections and the performance of the INDIA alliance to talk of a resurgence, and the results in both Haryana and J&K are being seen as a test of that theory.