India awaits the vote count of the parliamentary poll with bated breath. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's constituency - Varanasi - also the cradle of Hindu civilization - is the cynosure of a billion pairs of eyes. The ancient city has a mix of Hindu-Muslim population and has been a BJP bastion since 1991, except for 2004 when Congress' Rajesh Kumar Mishra who had briefly snatched it with a win. Varanasi voted along with 58 other parliamentary constituencies of the country on May 19.
read: Who will represent India as next PM? Counting to start soon
In 2009, Murli Manohar Joshi of the BJP wrested it back, only to have Narendra Modi contest from there in 2014 - while he (Joshi) was moved to Kanpur Lok Sabha seat. Joshi has been rested this time around. Modi had beaten his then nearest rival - the Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal - by an impressive margin of approximately over 3, 72,000 votes (Modi had polled 5,81,023 votes). The Congress' Ajay Rai had then got a mere 75,614 votes.
As counting is set to begin at 8:00 am and all eyes are on whether the real vote count matches with the exit poll predictions (that had predicted a big win for the BJP-led NDA). Election authorities said Wednesday that declaration of results of Lok Sabha seats as well as Assembly/by-poll seats may get delayed by around 3 to 4 hours as counting of voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) slips is likely to consume more time.
In 2014, Modi's popularity in Varanasi had swallowed the entire vote bank, sending his rivals to the brink of losing their deposits. About 10.28 lakh votes had been polled in the constituency when voting was held on 12 May and the BJP leader had won more than 50% of the vote share, as support seemed to have come from almost all sections of the electorate, cutting across caste and communal lines.