The Indian National Congress emerged as the largest party in the Lok Sabha, short of a majority on its own.

It won 244 of the 536 seats on offer.

That left it short of the 269-seat majority mark.

The Bharatiya Janata Party finished second, taking 121 seats on 20.1% of the vote.

The INC's own vote share — the slice of all ballots cast that went to one party or candidate — came to 36.4%, well under half the total but still enough for the most seats in the house.

The Bharatiya Janata Party was formed in April 1980 by former members of the Janata Party alliance, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as its first president. It contested its first general election in 1984.¹

Rajiv Gandhi, campaigning as Congress leader in the middle of the election, was killed by a suicide bomber at a rally in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, on 21 May 1991. The election's remaining phases, already under way, were briefly postponed before voting continued.²

Punjab's polling was called off after militants killed a number of candidates and campaigners in the run-up. Jammu & Kashmir's vote was called off too, for separate insurgency-related reasons. Punjab's Lok Sabha election was eventually held separately, in February 1992, while Jammu & Kashmir did not vote in this house at all.³

The BJP made the single biggest gain of the election, picking up seats mostly from the Janata Dal.

It picked up 46 of them.

The INC itself grew from 197 seats to 244 seats this time.

206 of 521 constituencies changed hands nationwide since the last election.

Turnout, the share of registered voters who actually cast a ballot, moved -6.0 pp from the previous election, to about 55.1%.

Results from a small number of seats are excluded from the national turnout figure above; see 2.

Akbarpur, Uttar Pradesh saw the tightest finish of the election: the winner's margin — how far ahead the winner finished, in votes, over whoever came second — was 156 votes.

Sikkim, Sikkim saw the widest margin of the election, with the winner finishing 86.9% of the vote ahead of the runner-up.

Turnout peaked at Cooch Behar, West Bengal, where 83.5% of registered voters cast a ballot — the highest of any seat in the country.

Thane, Maharashtra had the largest electorate anywhere in the country, with 17,44,592 registered voters on its rolls.

East Delhi, Delhi drew the most candidates of any seat, 105 names on the ballot.

Across the country, 8,807 candidates contested the election, an average of about 16.5 per seat.

Parliament passed the 61st Constitutional Amendment in December 1988, lowering the minimum voting age for Lok Sabha elections from 21 to 18. It took effect in March 1989, in time for that year's general election, bringing millions of newly eligible young voters into the electorate.⁴