NEW DELHI: Voting in India's marathon elections ended Wednesday, with exit polls giving the ruling Congress party and its allies a slight edge over the opposition bloc led by the Hindu nationalist BJP.

Neither grouping was seen as getting close to the 272 seats required to secure a parliamentary majority.

Exit polls have proved notoriously inaccurate in previous Indian elections, and the official result will only be announced by the Election Commission on Saturday.

Surveys carried by three news channels put the Congress-led coalition ahead, with CNN-IBN predicting a final tally of between 185 and 205 seats, against 165 to 185 seats for the alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

A similar result was forecast by other networks. Saturday's count is expected to trigger a frantic round of political horse-trading as both alliances scrabble among a multitude of regional parties for the extra partners needed to form a viable government.

‘Everything will depend on numbers,’ Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged at a press briefing this week.

After polls closed in the fifth and final phase of the month-long ballot, the official turnout was calculated at 60 percent of the 714 million electorate —up slightly on 2004 figures.

Whatever formation emerges to govern India, observers say it will likely be an unwieldy coalition that will struggle to present a united front as India faces a sharp economic downturn and numerous foreign policy challenges.

‘There is an absence of national leaders who are able to project the issues and enthuse people. There are no towering personalities to set an agenda for the nation,’ said political analyst Neerja Chowdhury.

In recent days, Congress leaders have made repeated overtures to the party's former communist partners, who withdrew their support from the ruling coalition last year in protest at the signing of a nuclear pact with the United States.

Playing on the image of the BJP as a communally divisive party, Singh said all secular forces had an obligation to work together to keep the Hindu nationalists out of government.

The BJP's candidate for prime minister, L.K. Advani, insisted that early divisions within his alliance had been more than compensated for by the support of new partners.‘If we have lost one ally, we have gained five,’ he told a rally.

The only realistic option to the two main rivals would be a ‘Third Front’ grouping of regional parties, but observers say they would be hard pushed to pull together the seats for a parliamentary majority.

The election comes at a pivotal time for India and its 1.1 billion people.

After five successive years of almost double-digit growth that lent the country the international clout it has long sought, the economy has been badly hit by the global downturn.

And there are major security concerns over growing instability in South Asia, particularly in arch-rival Pakistan, with whom relations plunged to a new low following last year's bloody militant attack on Mumbai.

For the more pessimistic analysts, these elections will provide little more than a stop-gap coalition that will fall under the weight of its multiple constituents.

‘Whatever is coming is not likely to last more than two years,’ said Yashwant Deshmukh, head of the C-Voter polling agency.—AFP