India's triumphant Congress prepares for govt

India's Congress Party has begun the task of forming a government after steering its ruling alliance to a second term in office with a resounding win over its Hindu nationalist rivals.

Senior alliance leaders met to formulate strategy and to choose which parties it might approach about securing a parliamentary majority, having fallen just short of the required 272 seats.

India has become used to unwieldy coalition governments which expend an inordinate amount of energy on simply staying together and not enough, critics say, on the job of policy implementation.

But with such a commanding victory, the Congress-led alliance will have no difficulty picking up the spare seats it needs to ensure a stable majority and will not be beholden to other groups.

Confounding expectations of a close result and a fractured parliament, the alliance won a projected 260 seats - a mandate nobody had predicted when voting began last month.

With some results still being counted, the Congress party alone was expected to end up with 200 seats - its best performance since 1991.

In the process it trounced its main rival, the opposition bloc led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party which was projected to win just 160 seats.

It also saw off its erstwhile communist partners, who had abandoned the ruling coalition last year in protest over a nuclear deal with the US.

The victory means a second term for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose calm, pragmatic persona appealed to voters looking for political stability.

The 76-year-old's new government faces numerous challenges both at home and abroad.

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

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.

Many newspapers on Sunday focused on the contribution made to the Congress victory by Rahul Gandhi, the son of party president Sonia Gandhi and many people's choice to succeed Singh as prime minister.

Mr Gandhi, 38, was widely credited with energising the party and bringing out the all-important youth vote.

There is speculation that Prime Minister Singh might step down after two years to allow Mr Gandhi to follow his father Rajiv Gandhi, his grandmother Indira Gandhi and his great-grandfather Jawarhalal Nehru into the prime minister's office.