Assembly Election Results 2021: The Election Commission has banned all victory processions due to the Covid surge.

New Delhi, May 2:

Mamata Banerjee looks set to win a third term in Bengal, the DMK is heading for victory in Tamil Nadu, the BJP is leading in Assam and the LDF in Kerala in the counting of votes for state polls. Health warning – these are very early leads.

Here are the top 10 updates on assembly election results 2021:

The latest forecast from NDTV Election Desk showed that the Trinamool is poised to get 205+ seats in Bengal, 140+ for the DMK in Tamil Nadu, 90+ for the BJP in Assam and in Kerala, 90 for the Left.

Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in Bengal is leading in 205 seats, though the BJP seems to have made gains since the 2019 national elections. The Chief Minister’s Trinamool and the BJP ran a bitter, no holds barred campaign that defied Covid safety rules as well as the poll code. But Mamata Banerjee is trailing the BJP’s Suvendhu Adhikari – her former close aide — in Nandigram, which is the most-watched fight in Bengal.

In Assam, the BJP is leading in 76 of the 126 seats, far ahead of its nearest rival Congress, which campaigned hard to reclaim its one-time bastion.

In Tamil Nadu, the DMK is well ahead of the ruling AIADMK, which has an alliance with the BJP. MK Stalin’s DMK and its allies are leading in 139 seats and the AIDMK, in 93.

In Kerala, the incumbent LDF is leading in 94 of the 140 seats and seems to be on its way to buck a 40-year tradition is the trend continues. The Congress-led UDF is leading in 44 seats.

In Puducherry, the N Rangaswamy’s AINRC-led alliance – of which the BJP is a part – is leading in 11 of the 30 assembly seats while the Congress is ahead in 6.

Voting for these elections took place in March and April, just as India started reporting thousands of fresh coronavirus infections every day. On March 14, two weeks before the first phase, there were fewer than 25,000 new cases a day. On March 27 there were around 62,000 and, by April 29, there were well over 3.5 lakh per day. On Saturday, new cases reached a record daily high of 401,993, the biggest across the world.

Alongside the Covid spike, leaders of all political parties, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, led political rallies at which large crowds discarded safety rules on masks and social distancing.

Last week the Madras High Court said the Election Commission “should probably be booked for murder” for not stopping rallies. Late Saturday the Commission hit back and filed a complaint in the Supreme Court.

The Election Commission has banned all victory processions. The poll body has also said candidates will not be allowed inside counting centres without either a negative Covid report (no older than 48 hours) or confirmation that they’d received both their vaccine shots.