(Explanatory note: this article is about the recent Assembly election in my state, Maharashtra. Most of you probably know that the BJP and its allies, the incumbents, swept to a massive majority in the Assembly.)

Post-mortems are easy. Especially after an election's results are known. Suddenly everyone has an explanation, a laser-focused dissection of what went wrong or right, a takedown of wisdoms that were conventional only days earlier, before the election.

Confession: I'm no different. To anyone who knows me, it should be no surprise that I'm thoroughly disappointed with the results of the Maharashtra Assembly election. Yet here's the thing: it wasn't really a surprise. Well, perhaps the size of the margin between victors and vanquisheds was a surprise. But only a small one. Because elections like the ones we have in India can and often do produce runaway results.

An explanation and analysis of that, I'll leave for another time. I'm wearing my coroner's hat for now, intent on a post-mortem.

It begins with a news report I found in the Indian Express on November 15. The headline was this: "Bharat Jodo Yatra a force of anarchists, failed to counter it, says Fadnavis."

That's Devendra Fadnavis, the BJP politician and then-Deputy Chief Minister of the state. That's the Yatra that Rahul Gandhi and his Congress Party undertook: Kanyakumari to Kashmir on foot, 3500+km over 150+ days between September 2022 and January 2023.

And that's how Fadnavis saw the Yatra: "a force of anarchists".

Now I joined the Yatra, four different times in four different states. Of course I didn't walk the whole 3500km, but the several dozen I did walk gave me a good sense of the spirit among the yatris. Which is why I sent several of the friends I made as we walked a copy of the news report. Because I knew they'd be as amused by Fadnavis's fulminations as I was. Because we know what fueled and suffused the Bharat Jodo Yatra. It wasn't anarchy. We weren't anarchists. Yet that Fadnavis used that word was hardly an insult to the Yatra's participants. On the contrary, it's a label that, coming from him, we might even wear with pride. Because we took it for what it was: a sign of how much the Yatra frightened him and his party.

Don't take my word for it. In that report, Fadnavis himself "attribut[es] the Lok Sabha defeat in Maharashtra to Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra." He himself says his party "failed miserably to set the counter-narrative." That "we were also overconfident." That "we had no capacity, capability and apparatus to counter [the Yatra's] narrative. We could not do anything about it."

What's all this? The language of a man terrified of his political future, that's what. This is a man who was faced with a phenomenon, the Yatra, unlike anything he had encountered politically before. He saw how it brought together politicians previously critical of each other. He saw the effect it had on ordinary people, the Yatra's daily video clips reminding him of the sheer numbers of those ordinary people whom it touched. For a man as steeped in politics as Fadnavis, understanding exactly what it all meant came easy: this Yatra amounted to a serious, substantial challenge to his own party's politics, the first in many years.

This explains the words he used to describe the effect the Yatra had on his party. For once, a political opponent set the narrative, forcing Fadnavis and his party to react. At doing which, they "failed miserably", because they lacked "capacity, capability and apparatus" and were "overconfident".

And this is why Fadnavis resorts to the label "anarchists".

And somewhere in there is the signal to the Congress and the BJP's other political opponents more generally, of how they might have approached this election and tasted more success. Short and simple: a relentless focus on building coalitions, and on reaching ordinary men and women - the people who flocked to the Yatra. It was because the Yatra attracted them in their millions, because they felt it spoke to and for them, because it bridged divides, that the BJP recognized it as a legitimate political threat. How such focus is manifest at election time is a good question to ask. But it must be asked and answered, if the BJP is to be defeated.

What we saw instead was an opposition often merely reacting to the BJP and its issues, its narrative. Like the "ladki-behin yojana" (a promised cash handout to women), freebies here and there, "vote jihad" and plenty more familiar BJP rhetoric. Also an opposition unable or unwilling to make the sometimes difficult compromises that coalitions are built upon.

Given those, it must have been straightforward for the BJP. Stick with the rhetoric, benefit from votes divided, sweep to power.

And leave a number of might-have-beens and what-ifs to mull over, for Yatra anarchists around the country.

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There are also substantial questions to be asked - being asked, really - about the electoral process over the last few elections in the country. The impression is that these are questions about Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). That impression has only been buttressed by stories of some EVM battery levels registering 99% even after a full day's polling, and the suspicion that those EVMs in particular registered majorities for the BJP at counting time.

To me, questioning EVMs is a futile exercise. It's too easy to reply, as the Supreme Court just did, that the questions come only from those who lost elections. (Though it's worth wondering why winners would ask questions anyway.)

In other words, it seems to me the real issue here is not the EVMs, but the electoral process itself. After all, we've had election crimes aplenty from long before the arrival of EVMs. That we still have doubts suggests that they still happen. Thus it isn't the technology at fault. Instead it is the process, the people. Those questions are not answered by assertion that EVMs are foolproof.

For example, take the Maharashtra election. The Election Commission announced that voter turnout through that November 20, till 5pm (an hour before polls closed), was 58.22%. Now Maharashtra's electorate amounts to nearly 100 million people. So that 5pm figure meant over 58 million had come out to vote till that time. That's good, but there was better to come.

I mean that "better". At 1130 that night, the turnout figure had increased, per the EC, to 65.02%. At 7am the next morning, when counting was about to start, it had increased some more, to 66.05%. That's an increase of 7.83% between 5pm and 7am. That's about 7.8 million people. Where did they materialize from? What explains their absence from the polls an hour before they closed, and their appearance by the next morning?

Dig into this a little further. Polling closed at 6pm on November 20. That is, the gates closed at 6pm, but everyone who had entered before 6pm and was waiting to vote was allowed to vote. So you could make a case that these 7.8 million Maharashtrians were these folks - people who voted between 5pm and 6pm, or people who entered their stations before the gates closed and were waiting to vote. Now Maharashtra had about 100,000 polling stations. Let's assume the overtime waiting was uniform across the state. That's about 78 voters at each station who were not counted at 5pm, but had been counted by the next morning.

Is that a reasonable number?

Perhaps you think so, and perhaps I'd agree, not least because the first turnout number here is indeed from 5pm, not 6pm when the polls closed. But the really strange thing here is the small increase between 1130pm and 7am. It's just over 1%, or about a million voters. So ok, I'll buy the argument that those who were waiting to vote at 6pm were accounted for by 1130pm.

But what accounts for the million more who were added through the night? Let's be clear: I'm hardly suggesting that this number is the reason for the victory of the BJP and its allies.

But I am suggesting that this number needs an explanation.

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