New Delhi, May 24 (AP/UNB) — At least 17 teenage students were killed in a fire that broke out Friday in a tutoring center in the western Indian city of Surat, police said.

Police officer Praveen Chaudhary said more than a dozen students were hospitalized with burns.

The students were attending a class when the fire broke out in the four-story building, Chaudhary said. He said all of the students had been accounted for.

Fire officer Deepak Satkale said 24 fire engines battled the blaze. Authorities were investigating the cause of the fire.

The Press Trust of India news agency said the fire engulfed the third and fourth floors of the building in a shopping district.

Television images showed some students jumping from the building to escape the blaze with a thick smoke billowing from the building.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was anguished by the fire. "Have asked the Gujarat Government and local authorities to provide all possible assistance to those affected," he tweeted.

Building fires are common in India because of poorly enforced safety regulations.

Dhaka, May 24 (UNB) -On Thursday when Indian PM Narendra Modi won a landslide victory in the Indian elections, Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and leader of India's Congress party, emerged at the other end, battered and mauled, reports BBC.

He is the primary heir to the ultimate political dynasty. His great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the first and longest-serving prime minister of India. His grandmother, Indira Gandhi, was the first female prime minister of the country, and his father was India's youngest prime minister.

If the 2014 election was Congress' worst political showing ever, Thursday's poll delivered a double blow to Mr Gandhi. Congress won just over 50 seats against the 300 plus that Mr Modi's BJP got; and if that was not bad enough, he lost his own seat in the family bastion of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh.

He will still sit in the parliament though because this time he contested from a second seat - Wayanad in Kerala - which he won.

However, Amethi was a prestige battle. It was the seat from where both his parents - Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi - had contested and won and he himself had held it for the past 15 years. Even an emotional letter delivered to every house in Amethi - addressed to "Mera Amethi Parivar" - was not enough to spare him a ballot box humiliation at the hands of the BJP's Smriti Irani, a high profile actress-turned-politician.

It sits in the heart of Uttar Pradesh - India's most populous state - which is considered the ground zero of politics. It's generally believed that whoever wins the state rules the country.

Eight of 14 Indian prime ministers - including Mr Gandhi's great grandfather, grandmother and father - were from the state, which elects the largest number of MPs - 80 out of a 545-member lower house. Even Narendra Modi, who is originally from Gujarat, chose Uttar Pradesh to make his debut as an MP in 2014 when he contested from the ancient city of Varanasi.

Not many were expecting an outright win for the Congress, but they were definitely expected to do better than 2014. That's why Thursday's results have stunned many inside and outside the party. Congress may limp on in parliament, but the question many people are asking is if this means the Gandhi era is over - or whether it should be ended to revive the party's fortunes.

What does Congress want?

On Thursday evening, Mr Gandhi addressed a press conference in Delhi where he conceded the election to Mr Modi, saying the people had given their mandate and chosen the BJP. He also took full responsibility for the Congress party's defeat.

And even though counting was not over in Amethi with more than 300,000 votes yet to be counted, he conceded the constituency to Smriti Irani.

"I want to congratulate her. She has won, it's a democracy and I respect the decision of people," he said.

Refusing to give further details about the Congress performance or what would come next, Mr Gandhi said it would all be discussed in the meeting of the Congress Working Committee, the party's top decision-making body.

He also told the Congress workers, the ones who lost and the ones who won, not to lose hope. "There is no need to be afraid. We will continue to work hard and we will eventually win."

But at the Congress office in Lucknow, the future victory that Mr Gandhi promised seemed like a distant dream to the handful of despondent party workers, glued to a TV screen, watching the bloodbath unfold as several party veterans lost their seats.

"Our credibility is very low. People have no faith in our promises. They are not trusting what we are saying," one party official who didn't want to be named told me.

"Mr Modi failed to fulfil the commitments he made, but people still believe him."

I ask him why?

"Even we can't understand why!" he says.

The dismal performance of the Congress is bound to raise questions over Mr Gandhi's leadership and many analysts are already calling for a change, demanding that he step down from the top party post. But all such calls, like in the past, have come from outside the party and are likely to be rejected by its leadership.

As rumours swirled around Delhi that Mr Gandhi had offered to quit, Congress politician Mani Shankar Aiyar told BBC Hindi that "Congress will not question its leadership and [will] not accept Mr Gandhi's resignation were he to offer it".

He added that the leadership was not the reason for the party's resounding defeat. "It's the other reasons we need to work on," he said.

A local party spokesman in Lucknow, Brijendra Kumar Singh, explained that, in their view, the problem was not with Gandhi power, but with party infighting and poor campaign choices.

"There are weaknesses in the party structure, there's infighting within the ranks, we were late getting off the ground with our campaign, and our attempts - though unsuccessful - to join the alliance of regional parties in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were a bad idea."

Congress leadership is - so far - not laying this defeat at the feet of Mr Gandhi, but in the organisation and campaign strategy of the party as a whole.

Personality contest?

Many Congress analysts might privately admit that Rahul Gandhi was on the losing side of an unwinnable personality contest. The biggest roadblock in their way, everyone agrees, was "Brand Modi".

"Even though the prime minister failed to fulfil the promises he made in the last election, he's still able to convince people about the policies of his government," Mr Singh says.

This is not the first time Mr Gandhi has received such a battering at Mr Modi's hands - he was all but written off after the party's worst ever performance in the 2014 elections when they won only 44 seats.

Subsequently, the party also lost several state elections and Mr Gandhi was criticised for being "remote and inaccessible" and was ridiculed on social media as a bumbling, clueless leader prone to gaffes.

He was also criticised by many for his dynastic links to the Nehru-Gandhi family and PM Modi, who comes from a humble background, has repeatedly said that Mr Gandhi had risen to the top not on merit, but because of family connections.

In private conversations, party workers describe Mr Gandhi as a "simple" man who lacks the "wiliness and cunning of his rival". So is this seen as a failure of the man or the Gandhi brand?

Gandhis reborn

But the party machinery does not blame him or his name for their loss. One party worker suggested what Mr Gandhi needs is an "Amit Shah" - a reference to the BJP party president who's helped craft Mr Modi's winning strategy and has been given credit for the party's victory - first in Gujarat and now in Delhi.

It's unlikely that they will blame Mr Gandhi - at least openly - for the debacle. If the past is any indication, they will rally behind him.

In the past two years Mr Gandhi's career graph had also begun to improve: he'd emerged from the shadows and was wearing his political skin with more ease. His social media campaigns became smarter and he began arguing convincingly about the government's controversial currency ban, a lack of employment opportunities, growing intolerance in the country and the slowdown in the economy.

He was increasingly seen as setting the agenda with a combative campaign and in December when he led the Congress to victory in important state elections in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, many said he had brought the party back into the reckoning.

And then in February, when his charismatic sister Priyanka Gandhi joined him in Uttar Pradesh, it seemed like the Gandhis were on to something.

There has long been a school of thought among some Congress enthusiasts that Priyanka might be the Gandhi to save the political dynasty. For whatever reason, she has been reluctant to take on that mantle. The siblings are believed to be close and it is unlikely she will be part of any plan that would see him pushed out. But she may well take on a bigger role in working with and supporting him.

In the end, this is being seen in Congress as a broad failure of party vision, an inability to connect with an India that Mr Modi has both defined and taken the pulse of.

"If you look at our manifesto, it's the best. The policies we had announced, the promises we made were top notch. But what we had hoped for from the voters, the support we had hoped for, that didn't happen," says state party official Virendra Madan.

Mr Madan says the party leadership in Delhi - as well as the state level - will hold meetings in the next few days to figure out what went wrong. "It's time for soul searching. To assess where we went wrong."

But, he says, that no matter how decisive the election result, there's no question of the party not standing by its leadership.

"It's not just Mr Gandhi who has lost. Lots of other leaders also did not win. And elections come and go, you win some and you lose some. Remember in 1984, BJP was down to just two seats? Didn't they make a comeback? We will also come back," he says.

New Delhi, May 24 (AP/UNB) — Dissatisfaction with India's lagging economy didn't deter voters from handing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party a landslide parliamentary election victory.

Now, they'll be expecting something in return: faster, bolder action on long-promised reforms to transform the economy and improve the lives of India's 1.3 billion people.

Modi made big promises ahead of the vote, viewed by many as a referendum on his first five-year term, which began in 2014. His election manifesto included pledges to double farmers' incomes and provide lavish aid to rural areas. He also vowed to make India the world's third-largest economy by 2030.

Such promises rang hollow for many unhappy with rising unemployment, slow progress in reforms and infrastructure construction and other initiatives that helped him win office in the first place.

Dhaka, May 24, (UNB) - Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan today congratulated his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi after the BJP swept the national election in trends released by the Election Commission, reports NDTV.

"I congratulate Prime Minister Modi on the electoral victory of BJP and allies. Look forward to working with him for peace, progress and prosperity in South Asia," tweeted Imran Khan, a former cricketer who became Pakistan's Prime Minister in August last year.

I congratulate Prime Minister Modi on the electoral victory of BJP and allies. Look forward to working with him for peace, progress and prosperity in South Asia

— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) May 23, 2019

PM Modi, responded, by saying he has "always given primacy to peace and development in our region."

Imran Khan's tweet came not long after other heads of state including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Chinese President Xi Jinping congratulated PM Modi after trend showed his party had taken comfortable majority in the 543-seat Lok Sabha, for which elections were held in 542 seats. A party or an alliance needs 272 seats to form government.

The results of the general election are significant for Pakistan as the formation of the next government in New Delhi would determine the course of bilateral ties, which fell to a new low after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 40 soldiers in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama.

In April, Imran Khan was quoted as saying by the media that he saw a better chance of peace talks with India if PM Modi's BJP won the national election. The Pakistan PM had said if the next government in India were led by the Congress party, it might be "too scared" to seek a settlement with Pakistan over Kashmir, fearing a backlash.

"Perhaps if the BJP - a right-wing party - wins, some kind of settlement in Kashmir could be reached," Imran Khan was quoted as saying by news agency Reuters.

Thank you PM @ImranKhanPTI.

I warmly express my gratitude for your good wishes. I have always given primacy to peace and development in our region. https://t.co/b01EjbcEAw

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) May 23, 2019

On Wednesday, Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi had said his country has delivered a "message of peace" by opening the Kartarpur corridor for Sikh pilgrims from India as he underlined the importance of "conflict resolution" for peace and stability in South Asia.

Addressing the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Council of Foreign Ministers' in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, also attended by Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj, Mr Qureshi had said enduring peace and prosperity in South Asia will remain elusive without good-faith diplomacy and result-oriented  dualogue.

New Delhi, May 24 (AP/UNB) — India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been meeting with leaders of his Bharatiya Janata Party fresh off his party's thunderous victory in the general elections.

A party official says Modi has arranged to meet with Cabinet members Friday evening.

The Election Commission says the BJP won 301 out of the 525 constituencies in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, as of late morning Friday. The party's top rival, the Indian National Congress led by Rahul Gandhi, won 52 seats, and the All India Trinamool Congress led by West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee won 22 seats. The final results are not in for the remaining 7 seats.

Vote counting of the estimated 600 million ballots cast in the world's largest democratic exercise began early Thursday.