AKIPRESS.COM - Counting of votes has begun in crucial elections in India's Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state, BBC reported.

Gujarat is a stronghold state for Mr Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has governed there for 22 years.

A number of exit polls have suggested that the BJP is on course to win the election this time as well.

But exit polls have been wrong in the past, and the rival Congress party was seen to have put up a spirited fight.

Votes are also being counted in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh.

Led by a resurgent Rahul Gandhi, the newly elected leader of the 132-year-old Congress, the party had stitched up an alliance with three newer, electorally untested leaders in Gujarat.

Among them Hardik Patel, a 24-year-old man who is too young to even contest elections, became what looked like the face of opposition to Mr Modi's party.

Mr Patel, a firebrand campaigner, is leading massive caste protests which have rocked Gujarat and sparked a movement demanding that the Patels - or the Patidar caste - be given better access to jobs and education through the quota system.

Some 14% of people in Gujarat are Patels, an influential farming community which has traditionally voted for the BJP.