Obama reaches out to outgoing Indian PM

Narendra Modi, the man expected to become India’s next prime minister, swept into New Delhi on Saturday and promised he “will try to make India self-reliant and strong.”

BJP also gains in Muslim areas

A Reuters analysis of Friday's sweeping election victory for Modi showed that many Muslim voters appeared to have put aside their fears and backed the BJP.
Alongside the sheer scale of Modi's triumph, the change in attitude among a sizeable proportion of Muslims is one of the most surprising outcomes of a vote where social and economic aspirations appear to have overridden other concerns.
Data provided by the Election Commission showed that in constituencies where the population of Muslims is more than 20 percent, a BJP candidate looked set to win in nearly half.
Of the 102 constituencies where, according to polling group CSDS at least one in five voters are Muslims, Election Commission data showed that a BJP candidate had won or was leading the count in 47.
In the 2009 election, the BJP won only 24 of these seats.
Modi's party was even heading for victory on Friday in two seats where more than half of the population is Muslim, and in 18 where more than a third of the voters are Muslims.

Commenting on reports of Congress President Sonia Gandhi 's daughter Priyanka Gandhi's willingness to contest elections from Varanasi, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy on Monday said that Gandhi would have been thrashed if she had done so as she drinks too much alcohol and has a bad name."They saved her. She would have got a thrashing. She is very unpopular, she drinks too much alcohol and she has a bad name, her husband has a bad name," said Swamy.
Yesterday, Swamy had called Gandhi an ungrateful daughter for going to see the prisoners in jail who assassinated her own father.
He also said that it was Priyanka Gandhi and not Varun Gandhi who has gone astray and had added that the former and her party were not able to digest the latter's success.
On Saturday, while accompanying Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi at Amethi while filing nomination papers, Priyanka had said that Varun Gandhi has chosen a wrong path and needed to be led in the right direction.