As you read this, EVMs are being stacked up, returning officers are nervously double-checking numbers, and candidates are laughing nervously at jokes that are a little too loud, a little too stale. The Count is on. We don’t know how it will end.

What we do know is how it won’t. In so many other parts of the world, elections have a clear ending: the concession speech. The losing candidate will get up on stage before a crowd of his supporters, thank them, congratulate his opponent (shushing the crowd’s boos) and promise to be constructive in opposition. Can you remember that happening here?

It doesn’t. Because, first of all, everybody claims to have won. You’ve fewer seats? Never mind, stress your voteshare increase. Or point out how well you’ve survived anti-incumbency. And how your alliance partners have all done well. Anything — rather than unequivocally admit defeat. In India, politics means never having to say you’re beaten.

Of course, there are some excuses for politicians. They’re spokesmen, mainly, so they can’t speak frankly for fear their don’t-get-to-be-on-TV colleagues will come down on them like a tonne of bricks. And they have to pretend to have won, on the off-chance that this means the president will absent-mindedly dial their chap’s number rather than the other fellow’s. Hence the tortured logic, the fixed, determined smiles, while all the while they’re wishing, inside, no doubt, that they had stuck to being plutocratic Supreme Court lawyers/ “independent” journalists/ contractors with an interesting past.

... contd.