The results for the month long Indian Lok Sabha elections are out and India has voted back the incumbent Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) into power with a decisive verdict, surprising many observers. As I write this post, the results for 480 out of the 543 seats have been declared. The Congress is leading in more than 200 seats and UPA is less than 20 seats away from reaching the magic figure of 273. The verdict is a reminder of the Indian electorate's love affair with the Nehru-Gandhi family and a coming of age of sorts for Rahul Gandhi, the young scion of the family. A jubilant Sonia Gandhi reiterated that Manmohan Singh will be Congress Party's choice for the prime minister. Manmohan Singh will be the first Prime Minister after Jawaharlal Nehru to return to power after a full five-year term. The verdict has also led to some serious soul-searching within BJP. It seems that Lal Krishna Advani's political career is all but over. It will be interesting to see if BJP moves away from its Hindutva roots and repositions itself as a Right of Center party or becomes even more hardcore Hindu Right under the leadership of someone like Narendra Modi. Some of the biggest upsets so far: Ram Vilas Paswan, Ram Naik, Renuka Choudhry, Vinod Khanna, Meera Sanyal and Captain Gopnath lost the election while Shashi Tharoor won by a record margin. Summary of Reactions from Indian Bloggers and Twitter Users The Congress supporters are jubilant, and the BJP die-hards are understandably glum, but most neutral Indian bloggers and Twitter users are happy with the verdict, for more reason than one. The two national parties — Congress and BJP — have increased their tally by 40-50 seats. Both Congress and BJP have a more-or-less similar forward-looking national agenda (apart from BJP's obsession with Hindutva), unlike the regional parties who are focused on caste, language and state affiliations. The consolidation of the national vote is a sigh of relief for the urban Indian “elite”, who were worried about the increasing fragmentation in Indian politics. The UPA is 15-20 seats short of the 273 seats it needs to form the government. This precludes the possibility of the opportunistic horse-trading many observers were expecting in the aftermath of the elections. The (almost) clear verdict for UPA is likely to result in a stable government that lasts for five years and isn't held hostage by the narrow agendas of the regional coalition partners. The decisive Congress victory has also surprised most observers. Most predictions and opinion polls had predicted an indecisive verdict with a close finish between BJP and Congress and a rise in the power of the regional parties. Some observers will see the verdict as a validation of the tried-and-tested methods of political campaigning in India. The BJP ran an aggressive 360 degree campaign on mass media and digital media, but it didn't work, like its 2004 India Shining campaign. The Congress ran a traditional campaign, focused on movie songs, local rallies and the charisma of the Nehru-Gandhi family, and succeeded. I would caution you against reading too much into this coincidence and mistaking it for causality. It's not BJP's campaign, but BJP's Hindutva ideology, that has failed the party. BJP has lost in spite of its brilliant campaign, not because of it. #IndiaVotes09: Reactions from Indian Twitter Users Twitter conversations related to the Indian elections fell into a few distinct categories, including retweets of news reports on the elections results, exuberance over the Congress win, some soul-searching over BJP's loss (from a very strong BJP support base on Twitter), and opinions on what the election results mean for India. Apart from the themes I have talked about above, the #indiavotes09 hastag on Twitter had its own unique memes. The first such meme was predictably self referential. After a handful of tweets on the #indiavotes09 hastag throughout the month long elections, the Indian Twitter community spent the day obsessing about election results, making #indiavotes the number one trending topic on Twitter. This led to the usual recurcive navel gazing about how an India-related hashtag is trending on Twitter and Economic Times even did a story on it. @Hiway: Indian Twitter community too big and united to be ignored: #indiavotes09 is trending. (we've made many topics ‘trend’ recently) (Aside from the Economic Times story: As per ViziSense, which analyses web visitor statistics, there are about 533,000 India-based users of Twitter. Tweeple.in follows 31,000 Twitter users in India.) Dina just pointed to an interesting graphic on the irrelevance of trending topics on Twitter, which should dampen the exuberance over #indiavotes09 trending on Twitter.