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It's a good thing we will be stuck with a kindler, gentler Vajpayee

And, for the morning after the results of the last election of the millennium, a few stray thoughts and a few general opinions and a few points of view (all my own work, with apologies to Busybee):

Like, regardless of what the spokesmen of the two parties say, this has neither been a victory for Atal Bihari Vajpayee's BJP nor Sonia Gandhi's Congress. This has been a victory for the "others".

Like despite the hype about Vajpayee's leadership and performance, and Pokhran and Kargil, it's clear voters haven't rewarded the BJP as the party had hoped.

Like despite the bluff and bluster about Sonia Gandhi's revival of the Congress, in the end she secured fewer seats for her party than Sitaram Kesri did last year (141) and clocked the Congress's worst-ever defeat.

Like it's hard to believe but we must learn to believe that even if the BJP and Congress were to come together, they would have just about managed to cobble together a majority. Long live our democracy.

Like it's a good thing we won't be stuck with an inexperienced Italian with no commitment to democratic principles and who is supported by such demigods of Indian polity like J Jayalalitha and Laloo Prasad Yadav.

Like it's a good thing we will be stuck with a kindler, gentler Vajpayee who draws his support not from the Rajju Bhaiyyas of the world but from a forward-looking technocrat like Chandrababu Naidu and a federalist like M Karunanidhi.

Like you may hate Narendra Modi, but there is more than a grain of truth in his statement that for the first time in 10 years, the people of India have robbed the Congress of its ability to destabilise the next government.

Like the "other" victors of this election are Vir Sanghvi and Karan Thapar. The DD duo socked it to Prannoy Roy's Star News. And how.

Like the Janata Dal is dead. RIP.

Like this is not a vote for stability but the people of Madurai have certainly done a favour to the country by ensuring that Subramanian Swamy not only lost but lost his deposit.

Like this election has exposed all talk of the country heading towards a two-front Presidential style election as a load of nonsense. The amorphous "third front" is still around and nobody had a clue.

Like all said and done, BJP+allies have fared much much better than Congress+allies, and the fact that they ended up with a near-300 tally in spite of the Uttar Pradesh debacle, shows how well they did.

Like although the BJP men may gloat that the NDA did better than Congress+allies, it's quite clear the tail will wag the dog, with the allies ending up with more than a third of the NDA tally.

Like Ramakrishna Hegde may call it an unfortunate development, but the triumph of the "others" means we are getting closer and closer to a truly federal setup with each passing election.

Like this election would have seen a slightly different outcome had diesel prices been hiked when it was due, which is six months ago, than now, a day after polling and a day before counting.

Like while the Congress may make much of the reduced margin of Atal Bihari Vajpayee's win in Lucknow, in the end Karan Singh secured lesser votes than Raj Babbar did in the last election.

Like while the BJP may make much of Sonia Gandhi's victory margin in Bellary, in the end she did well to arrest the Congress slide in the "safe-constituency" over her stronger-than-Karan Singh rival, Sushma Swaraj

Like as Yogendra Yadav says the most striking thing in this election was that there was no consistency in the way we voted.

Like by kicking out the Shiromani Akali Dal in spite of the Badal government's power subsidies, the voters have shown that populism alone isn't enough to win their trust, although Tohra helps.

Like we were told that Sonia Gandhi opted for the border-constituency of Bellary because it would help Congress prospects in both Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Why did it work in one state and not in the other?

Like although it's tempting to paint Chandrababu Naidu's win as a vote for liberalisation, the fact remains that the two great votaries of liberalisation, Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram, were both booted out.

Like although it's tempting to paint Manmohan and Chidambaram's defeat as a vote against liberalisation, the fact remains that the most silent votary of liberalisation Digvijay Singh escaped in better shape.

Like Sheila Dixit probably has a point in saying that the Delhi outcome would have been different if the capital had gone to the polls in the latter phases than in the first when Kargil was hot.

Like the BJP says it swept Delhi because national issues were to the fore and Kalyan Singh says the UP verdict is a referendum on the Centre's polices. So what gives?

Like while the Shiv-Sena BJP combine can thank Sharad Pawar for being the haddi in the Congress kabab, the voters didn't really forget the misrule of Bal Thackeray's remote-controlled government, after all.

Like Sitaram Yechuri had a good question: Why is it that the anti-incumbency factor doesn't affect the Left Front government in West Bengal although it has been around for 22 years?

Like a big surprise is Bihar.

Like Karnataka proves that politicians should never count their chicken before they are hatched. The BJP-JD-U were squabbling over who their CM would be when it was clear the alliance would aid the Congress.

Like Ramakrishna Hegde probably doesn't know whether to cry at the dismal performance of the JD-U or whether to laugh at the plight of his pet-peeve, H D Deve Gowdaji.

Like Mark Tully said on television the stunning show of the "others" in UP proves that the so-called vote-banks do not quite vote in the herd-like manner that we expect them to. Thank bhagwan, allah, god for that.

Like an unlikely television star has been Kanshi Ram arguing coolly and patiently before the Oxbridge types for more "social democracy" without once revealing what he and the BSP wanted.

Like it is clear from Karnataka and UP and Rajasthan and Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh and Assam that we journalists know as little about the turf we claim to report than the pollsters we love to hate.

Like all pollsters have egg on their faces to varying degrees but none more so than the self-styled "instinctive" psephologist Arun Nehru who lost not to Satish Sharma but to Priyanka Gandhi.

Like in Priyanka, not Sonia Gandhi, lies the future of the Congress as can be seen from the party's improved showing in Uttar Pradesh.

And this final point of view:

That after the results come in, it's good for politicians and pollsters and journalists to remember James "Scotty" Reston, the legendary columnist of the New York Times who said an election is a secret communion between a voter and democracy, and we should not pry too much.

Krishna Prasad