Politicians seek mandates and add a spin to the result. If policies are to be based on the “mandate”, then we need to know what the people demanded in Election 2004. This should be useful in drafting guidelines - e.g. the Common Minimum Programme, and later on, actual policies e.g. the Budget.

The popular opinion is that democracy is about vote-shares. It is - but in highly heterogeneous India, it gets mediated in strange and mysterious ways. Mostly by coalition politics. That is what has happened in all the elections since 1984, possibly barring 1989.

First, however, the popular perception about the meaning of this election, the meaning as articulated by the politicians, and other intellectual "experts". Among the latter, Salman Rushdie writes "the dispossessed of India have dealt a mighty blow to the assumptions of the country's political and economic chieftains, and the lesson should be learned by all parties: Ignore the well-being of the masses at your peril." Prem Shankar Jha concurs: "Life (under NDA) had become extremely insecure, income differentials had widened sharply". The articulate, youngish looking and with a "graduate student in a coffee shop demeanor" CPI (M) leader, Sitaram Yechury, believes that the people voted against the NDA because of its anti-poor economic policies.

Salman Rushdie always writes good fiction, whether about midnight's children or other streams of consciousness; he is paid to do so. The others are paid to know reality, and to fail at it is to…. Three of the poorest states in the country - Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Rajasthan, voted for the NDA - the party whose development model ostensibly was not for the poor. The two richest cities in India, Bombay and Delhi, voted for the alliance whose development model is anti-urban and anti-rich!

Some other facts for the "in the name of the poor" experts. Most vote facts underline the irrelevance of performance, or economic reforms, or much else, in election 2004. Nationally, the BJP had a swing against it of 2.02 percent, the Congress a higher negative swing of 2.08 percent; but the Congress gained 31 seats and the BJP lost 45 seats! Congress+ got 35.01 percent of the votes, the BJP+ a marginally higher share of 35.3 percent; but Congress+ gained 66 seats, and BJP+ lost 90 seats! The great hope of the poor, Laloo Yadav's RJD party, obtained a little more than a quarter of the vote in Bihar - and 6.2 percentage points less votes than in 1999!

The simple point is that this election was not about a mandate, and most emphatically not about the economic reform polices pursued by NDA (and pursued by every government since Congress - and the likely new Prime Minister - initiated reform policies in 1991). If the Left can recognize these differences they should educate us all about their "new" economic model.

If not reforms, nor Sonia's foreign origin, nor BJP's performance, then what was this election all about? It was about a doomed alliance in Tamil Nadu, stupid. Period. For the icing, doomed anti-incumbency in Andhra Pradesh - doomed because no one gets elected to a third term, except perhaps if you so mis-govern as in Bihar. The swing in favour of Congress+ in these two states: 60 seats, the gains evenly divided (31 in Tamil Nadu and 29 in AP). In AP, the TDP and BJP gained 41.52 percent of the vote - the Congress gained only 0.04 percent more at 41.56, and down marginally from 42.8 percent in 1999. The TRS made all the difference with its small 6.8 percent of the vote. Is it fair, to either intellectual honesty or political reality, to derive grandiose, self-serving ideological interpretations for India from what happened in two southern states - and happened according to narrow, local considerations and/or coalition math?

In 1999, when the NDA was elected, most analysts rightly said that the mandate was not for swadeshi and Hindutva. (Interestingly, the former is not even mentioned anymore - the latter, not having much meaning to begin with, has even less meaning today. And this reality is within the BJP!) Analogously, this mandate is not for new anti-reform polices, or even for old "in the name of the poor" policies. Free power for all helps the rich industrialists a lot more than poor farmers. The NDA won because of electoral math in 1999 - the Congress won because of electoral math in 2004. Vajpayee ran a successful coalition government - it remains to be seen whether Congress can match, and Manmohan Singh can better, Vajpayee's superlative performance.

What this election seems to be about (and what every election in India, barring 1991, has been about) is the emergence, nee dominance, of election math. Indian elections are about coalition politics. Such politics can only help get a coalition elected - to make it run successfully might requires genius and leadership. Just look at the figures contained in the table. The table documents the vote-shares, and seats, of the two coalition pillars - BJP (lotus only) and Congress (hand only). Five important trends are revealed. First, that the Congress has been in a deep decline since 1989 - from 40 to 25 percent of the national vote. Second, that the BJP has more than doubled its "initial" 1989 vote share of 11.4 percent. Third, that the joint vote-share has stayed solidly constant at 50 percent, plus-minus 2 percent - and that 2004 witnessed the low end of the range. Fourth, that the vote-share of both parties has stabilized around 25 percent individually, and their seats at 150; each party therefore requires large coalitions, at least a quarter of all MPs or 123 seats. Fifth, these individual vote-shares are not in any sense of the term a mandate, a vote by the people. In 1991, the BJP polled 20 percent votes and garnered 120 seats. In 1998 it gained the same amount of votes, but a third more seats - 161. The Congress got 28 percent of the popular vote in 1999 and only 114 seats. Today, it has gained 2 percent less votes and 41 more seats!

These numbers confirm the reality of the new India - or India almost 20 years old. The two major parties have half - regional parties have the other half of the national vote. Dynasty does not matter, nor does foreign origin - even if they did, their importance gets swamped by what happens between bedfellows. Governance does not matter, and nor does ideology. What matters is coalition politics, and what side of the anti-incumbency the major party finds itself.

If the 1999 election was correctly not about the craziness of swadeshi, this election is most manifestly not about economic policies. What the NDA did was to continue with the reforms initiated by the Congress a decade earlier, and followed by the United Front in 1996. Vajpayee stayed for six years with 23 parties, the United Front stayed for two years with considerably fewer. The lesson for the politicians is clear. Unless the Congress+ accelerates economic reforms and delivers accelerating growth via accelerating reforms, the coalition might be in trouble. That is the importance of the necessary condition of survival - economic reforms, and the sufficient condition of power - electoral math.