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NEW DELHI — Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party won a landslide victory in the world’s largest election as voters endorsed his vision of a muscular, assertive and fundamentally Hindu India.

The result represents a stunning vote of confidence in Modi, a charismatic and polarizing politician who is part of a crop of right-leaning populist leaders around the globe.

Official results showed Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, on track to win 303 seats in Parliament, well above the 272-seat majority mark. No Indian prime minister has returned to power with a similar mandate in nearly five decades. The size of Modi’s victory was unexpected, surpassing his party’s winning performance in 2014.

The vote is a “mandate for a new India,” Modi told hundreds of cheering supporters on Thursday night after they showered him with flower petals. “If someone has won today, it’s the country. If someone has won today, it’s this democracy.”

The son of a tea seller, Modi first swept to power five years ago on a desire for change and a belief that he could transform this country of more than 1.3 billion people, unshackling the economy and creating millions of jobs.

Such expectations remain unfulfilled, and in this election, Modi instead pushed a message of nationalist pride, telling voters that he was the only candidate who would safeguard the country’s security and fight terrorism.

[Read The Washington Post’s full coverage of India’s election]

Modi’s win is a victory for a form of religious nationalism that views India — home to a diversity of faiths — as essentially a Hindu nation and seeks to jettison the secularism promoted by the country’s founders. Although India is about 80 percent Hindu, it is also home to Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and other religious communities.

Like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and President Trump, Modi has stirred voters with a combination of hope and fear, mixing a desire for national greatness with perceived threats from enemies internal and external. He also shares those leaders’ disdain for the news media: Modi did not hold a single news conference during his first term.

Under Modi, India and the United States have become closer as both seek to manage a rising China, and he and Trump appear to have a good relationship. Trump on Thursday tweeted his congratulations to Modi on the “BIG election victory” and said he looked forward to “continuing our important work together!”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept to a huge election victory May 23, on course to increase his Bharatiya Janata Party's majority in Parliament. (Reuters)

Roughly 600 million people, or 67 percent of eligible voters, cast ballots on electronic voting machines in India’s six-week election, which began April 11.

The results are a turning point for India and cement the dominance of Modi and the BJP. “Something fundamentally has shifted” with this vote, said Milan Vaishnav, who heads the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The BJP “has emerged as the hegemonic force in Indian politics.”

The Indian National Congress, the country’s main opposition party, was winning or leading in just 51 seats, a disastrous showing for a once-mighty political force that governed India for most of the country’s post-independence history.

Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi clan, was unable to find a strategy to counter Modi’s appeal. Gandhi conceded defeat to a BJP candidate in his own constituency in a longtime Congress stronghold. Candidates in Indian elections can run in more than one constituency, and Gandhi also ran for a seat in southern India where he was on track to win.

Gandhi congratulated Modi on the victory but declined to discuss his campaign’s shortcomings. “It doesn’t matter what I think went wrong,” he told reporters. “What matters is that the people of India have decided that Narendra Modi is going to be prime minister. And as an Indian person, I fully respect the people’s verdict.”

The opposition had “neither a program nor a leader nor a narrative,” Pavan Varma, a spokesman for a regional party aligned with the BJP, told the Indian television channel NDTV. The BJP, meanwhile, had Modi as a candidate and a potent election machine, he said. It also had more money than any other party in the race by several orders of magnitude.

Modi’s supporters exulted at the outcome. The win is “miraculous,” wrote Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Twitter. India has proved that it “wants growth and a leadership that believes in the country first.” Several world leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, congratulated Modi on his reelection.