Put this argument to test in two cases. Barack Obama’s win in America in 2008 and the Congress’s win in India in 2004. The unexceptional base argument in both cases is that parties of the centre-right who had grown politically arrogant were humbled by voters. That’s deserved punishment. But centre-left enthusiasm ascribes to these verdicts a radical political-economic cohesiveness that’s simply not there.

So the Congress’s win was interpreted and continues to be interpreted as a popular verdict against economic reform. Those who say this won’t look at facts presented many times. The BJP lost in urban centres, where reform beneficiaries live. The Congress didn’t sweep poorer states like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, where the BJP did relatively well. From the time the Congress lost monopoly over national power, all national incumbents bar two have lost. So 2004 was the rule, not the exception.

From the mid-1980s, all governments abandoned reforms mid-term, much before general elections came around. Therefore, governments went to voters minus fresh-in-mind reformist activism. Clearly, therefore, it’s hard to make a case that the 2004 Indian verdict was a “revolt of the peasants”, as the Guardian had so nicely and so wrongly put it.

The 2008 American verdict is producing a similar fancy centre-left superstructure: American popular will wants a shift to the left, a liberal (as Americans define the term) supermajority is in the making, American capitalism and foreign policy will change.

Some facts. Barack Obama is a church-going, family-values espousing president-elect who will have a muscular foreign policy. How incredibly different fundamentally is that from usual American presidents? Obama should also be smart enough to know what liberal activism has done to Democratic presidents domestically.

Bill Clinton’s liberal enthusiasm in his first term produced a Republican mid-term election victory. Interestingly, among Republican winners was a new governor in Texas: George Bush. Clinton thereafter ruled, as the Economist had put it, as a moderate Republican. Jon Meacham explains in a brilliant piece in the Newsweek (October 27 issue) why President Obama will have to rule what will continue to be an essentially centre-right nation.

How a nation is governed after these fancy centre-left superstructures come to dominate public discourse of course depends on the ruling classes — politicians who win or lose power and the permanent administrative structure. The key variables are whether and how quickly the ruling classes detect and reject the fanciness of centre-left’s post-victory constructions.

Part of America’s strength is that this detection/rejection ability is well-honed. The ruling classes understand that on economics and foreign policy, governing from the centre-right is the sensible option. This is made possible because there isn’t a huge gap between politicians and the permanent establishment. India doesn’t share this trait.

India’s permanent establishment has come to understand broad centre-right governing imperatives quite well. India’s politics hasn’t.

The change in the establishment came from the time of Rajiv Gandhi. In many ways the original reformer, Rajiv, without ever saying so, started chipping away at his mother’s seemingly permanent and frighteningly fanciful centre-left superstructure.

The permanent establishment really came on its own after the early 1990s’ economic crisis. It is under-appreciated how smartly India’s establishment responded: they used the context of IMF conditions to push through radical domestic reform but disregarded many Fund suggestions. Contrast this to the supposed golden age of India’s economic sovereignty: In 1966, Ashok Mehta, India’s chief planner then, presented fourth plan proposals to the then US president, Lyndon Johnson. The plan was worthless without American aid.

In the current crisis, too, India’s establishment has responded with centre-right maturity. The priority has been to secure Indian capitalism’s short-term future; there’s no systemic threat in the medium term. The establishment is again being under-appreciated. Consider the following: India’s stock markets haven’t had to shut down despite wild swings. The capital market regulator hasn’t had to ban short sales; America’s and Britain’s have had to. The obdurate central bank bureaucracy has been quietly outmanoeuvred. Rumours haven’t been able to cause a run on banks. Industry has already been told that state help for capitalists can’t be a free lunch.

India’s politics has learnt to let India’s establishment be when there’s a crisis. But in normal times India’s politics is acutely vulnerable to centre-left fancies. Both the Congress and the BJP as political entities bought into the centre-left interpretation of the 2004 verdict. Although both have plenty of people whose economic governance instincts are basically centre-right, their politics is not weighty enough.

The basic reason is that India doesn’t have a two-party system. The two main parties can’t afford to have a more or less permanent policy view on broad issues because in a fiercely competitive democracy they are vulnerable to smaller niche players who essentially practice the politics of grievance. These parties typically don’t have a stake in national political-economic projects. But they have the potential to influence electoral results.

Centre-left political fancies, which are always advertised in the name of the disadvantaged, sell well in such a political market. Whether India can ever have a two-party system is dismissed by many as an elitist fantasy question. But think. Leaving out Kerala and Bengal as Left-dominated outlier cases, and Tamil Nadu as a state where regional parties will continue to dominate, genuine progress towards a two-party system can be made if the BJP can become a viable player in Andhra Pradesh and the Congress and the BJP become big players in Uttar Pradesh again. That’s tough but not impossible.

In an India where the BJP and the Congress share most of the political prizes, neither party would need to periodically undercut each other on basic policy issues. The centre-right ruling class consensus would almost always survive centre-left fancies, as it does in America’s two-party system. And as it will during the Obama administration.

So let’s concede for now that America will read the 2008 verdict better than we did the 2004 one.

saubhik.chakrabarti@expressindia.com