This roller coaster of a day may not be over yet. The Election Commission has yet to declare even one seat yet in the Bihar assembly elections, and so any analysis has to come with the caveat that things might yet change. Yet trends based on actual EC data, which the TV channels have caught up to, suggest that the Grand Alliance will be forming the government in Bihar.

That's a stunning turnaround not just from earlier in the day when NDTV had predicted a 140+ seat count for the Bharatiya Janata Party, but from earlier in the year when it was unclear whether the Grand Alliance would even become a reality. BJP, led by Prime Minsiter Narendra Modi and party president Amith Shah, looked like an unstoppable force that would roll through the Hindi heartland having already conquered it once in the Lok Sabha elections.

The implications of this result are legion. Here are a few quick takeaways that will get plenty of time to develop as this result sinks in.

For Bihar: Nitish Kumar is set to return as Chief Minister of the state once again, a powerful vindication of his tenure in the state, which he is credited for having transformed from its Jungle Raj days. That said, yet again Kumar has not come to power by himself and this time his alliance partner seems even harder to deal with than before. For much of the Janata Dal (United)-BJP reign it was clear that development was the primary agenda for a state that has missed out on much of it. But with the Rashtriya Janata Dal winning big in the state, its chief Lalu Prasad Yadav will certainly expect to get his pound of flesh. The two parties have, for the longest time, been rivals  with little overlap. Negotiating this new terrain as alliance partners will be a complex affair that will not be without friction.

For the BJP: The Modi-Shah train has properly been halted. Delhi was explained away as an anomaly, a BJP mistake because of its terrible chief ministerial choice. It's now starting to look more and more like opponents have understood the tactics that Amit Shah used to win the Lok Sabha elections and have adapted. This couldn't have been illustrated better by the BJP's desperation to double down on a communal and case-based platform towards the end of the election when it was clearer that they were struggling. Now that even that tactic has failed, the BJP will have to decide what lessons it is going to take away from Shah and Modi's biggest failure yet. Senior journalist Ashok Malik made the point clearer.



 For India: In the aftermath of the 2014 elections, the BJP looked across the map of India as a land of tremendous opportunity. It didn't just want to convert the states, like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where it had done well in the Lok Sabha elections but to expend into new territory like Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Those ambitions may not have ended but they've been severely hit. The BJP's roadmap to controlling the Rajya Sabha becomes much harder and this result is going to empower all those portions of the Opposition that have a clear anti-Modi outlook. Worse for the BJP, its own alliance partners that have been concerned about the saffron party's "arrogance," like the Shiv Sena and the Shiromani Akali Dal, are going to be even more assertive about their role in alliances that the BJP so far controlled. If we thought there was a lot of politicking in the last two years, it's about to get worse.




For pollsters and TV news channels: Err, what's going on?