But the people who never, never, admit defeat are the rest of us. Pontificators. Politicians might lose — not winning your home constituency, for example, is a trifle hard to spin as a win, as some fairly major figures might find out through the day today — but pontificators never do. We are always right, sometimes retrospectively.

Elsewhere, people have to admit they got it wrong, that something can’t be explained by their preferred narrative. Half of America’s commentators have admitted they got Iraq wrong, if for the right reasons. (The other half say they got it right, but for the wrong reasons.) And the count is usually time for over-extended commentators to begin to reflect on how they might have made a mistake. But India’s an exception. We are divinely ordained as always right. (The pontiff is infallible. Pontificators are infallible too.)

Why is that? Because these elections are so much more complex and layered than processes elsewhere, that devotees of all-explaining theories will always find supportive evidence if they look hard enough. We’ve all seen people do that; psychologists call it “confirmation bias”, and worry that it causes “attitude polarisation” — when two people look at the same evidence, draw different conclusions based on their preconceived notions, and then declare the other person absurdly wrong and not worth speaking to. There’s a direct line between that and screechy TV discussions.

And so, in the interest of our collective sanity and eardrum-health, it’s probably necessary to provide everyone with several grains of salt with which to take what you are told is happening. Here, thus, is a necessarily incomplete set of Grand Narratives, and how their devotees will spin things regardless of outcome.

... contd.