Though the 15th Lok Sabha is still a hung parliament that is a mere technicality; the Congress led United Peoples Alliance has romped home in what is a personal triumph for Dr Manmohan Singh and a vindication of his stewardship from 2004 to 2009. This time victory does not belong to the ‘Sonia factor; it is Singh’s, but a share of the campaigning credit goes to Rahul Gandhi.

What has the electorate said, apart from teaching the CP(M) a lesson? The Prime Minister’s incorruptibility has been reward, the electorate has declared no-contest with the Indo-American nuclear agreement and snubbed the left on the issue, it has said it prefers the UPA’s slow pace of market capitalism to the BJP’s offer of a more strident version, it has not evinced much interest in the humanitarian disaster facing the Vanni Tamils in Lanka, and perhaps most important of all, it has sent a clear signal in favour of secularism. The electorate has also said it endorses, and has not forgotten, the economic restructuring that ensured sustained growth till the global downturn blunted it – see my "India’s Refulgent Economy" in the Sunday Island of 2 December 2007.

I do not like some of these messages, and some I do. More about that later, but there is no denying that vox populi has spoken.

Along with about one million others I predicted a hung parliament in India and foresaw a fairly strong showing by the Congress led UPA and a setback for the Left Block ("India’s hung parliament", Sunday Island, 5 April). The UPA secured 262 seats (I predicted 220), and the BJP’s led NDA, 160 (my expectation was 170). The Left Block (LB) with just 24 seats has done even worse than I forecast (40 seats) and has even been defeated in its two bastions, West Bengal and Kerala. Mainly for this reason, but also because Third Front (TF) regional parties, though improving their positions did not do as well as expected, the TF secured 79 seats well short of the forecast 110. An electoral bloody nose has indeed been handed out to the CP(M) and this is what I had to say in the aforementioned article;

A silver lining to this cloud is that the UPA does not need the support of the Left Block or Third Front regional partners like Mayawathi and Jayalalitha to form a government. What this means is that the Third Front will not splinter as various actors run off searching for slots in the new government. Survival of the Front reasonably intact for up to five years is an opportunity for consolidation.

An important new trend in this election is the swing away from regional parties to national parties, or to be more accurate, to Congress. In Utter Pradesh the ex-UPA ally, the Samajawathi Party of Mulyam Singh Yadev, dropped from 35 to 23 seats but the other regional party Mayawathi’s BSP’s remained static at 19- in addition to being regional, these are also caste-based parties. Where did the seats go? To Congress, that secured a respectable number (21) after a long time in this, India’s most populous and quintessentially cow-belt state. Some of these numbers are liable to change but by just plus or minus one. In Maharashtra and Andhra, two big states, Congress made substantial gains at the expense of communal and regional parties, while in another big state, Bihar, the RJD and LJP, were routed. Congress also made a clean sweep of Delhi. In Orissa the landslide victory of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), which split from the BJP in March to link up with the Third Front is welcome news. The BJD has promised protection to the Christian community in a state where they live in fear of pogroms and church burning.

There is a clear sign of a return of the Indian electorate to secular values, even more so if one treats ‘casteism’ as essentially anti-secular. I am not including Congress victories in West Bengal and Kerala in this context; these are swings from secular national parties (Communists) to another (Congress). A return to the secular values of the Nehru era is something to celebrate though I would have liked to see it manifested as left victories.

The DMK-Congress alliance did not lose ground, improving from 26 to 27 seats in Tamil Nadu, but Jayalalitha’s AIADMK rose from zero to 7. However there was a corresponding decline for her the pro-Dravidian PMK and MDMK allies. The other TF partners, the communist parties, also lost two seats between them. All in all it was kind of a draw between the UPA and the TF in the state, that is, the TF managed to just hold off the all-India swing to the UPA, in Tamil Nadu.

The war in Lanka did influence voting in Tamil Nadu though this is not readily visible in the seat count - I doubt whether GoSL holding off occupation of the Vanni pocket and announcement of ‘mission accomplished’, till after polling, made a difference. To understand the intricacies one has to look at individual constituencies where a new pro-Dravidian party, the DMDK of actor turned politician Arun Subramanium, which contested separately, turned out to be a spoiler for the Third Front (TF). Subramanium is a breakaway from the PMK (Ramados’ party) and took away thousands of votes from the TF making possible DMK or Congress victories in about eight constituencies. The significant conclusion is that the cause of the Lankan Tamils remains a stronger issue in Tamil Nadu than the seat count implies.

[I haven’t worked through the details yet, but just two examples; in Siridempur the DMK polled 353,000 and the PMK 328,000, but Arun Subramanium took away 87,000, presumably mainly PMK, votes. Home and Finance Minister Palaniyandi Chidambaram polled 333,000 votes in Sivagang to scrape through by a majority of 3000 against his AIADMK rival, but the DMDK candidate polled 60,000 votes].

I think Winston Churchill was on the ball when he quipped: "Democracy is the worst of all possible systems, except for the rest". India is such a kaleidoscope that a muddled outcome is nothing to get upset about; the elections have to be counted as a big success for democratic norms. The post election phase of putting together a new government is usually pure horse-trading, unprincipled in the extreme with no logic or loyalty, but this time because of the handsome victory of the Congress led alliance we will be spared the spectacle. There is no need for dirty horse-trading; the needed parliamentary majority of 272 will fall in place easily. Opportunist UPA truants and erstwhile UPA partners, the Samajawadi Party (SP) in Utter Pradesh, and the two Bihar clowns RJD and LJP will now come back, cap in hand, for a place at the porcine trough

The final question is how will the outcome of the elections affect the post-war situation in Lanka? Within a few days we face a dramatically transformed situation in South Asia on two fronts; the surrender of the LTTE in Sri Lanka and the return of Congress to power in India with greater strength. On the face of it things can improve. GoSL now has no excuses for not opening the camps to international agencies, relaxing draconian democratic rights violations and implementing devolution in full. Will it? I think none of this will happen.