If election predictions by “journalists” and analysts are increasingly becoming a mug’s game, making sense of election results by them is quite like blind men in a dark room feeling the proverbial elephant and imagining or interpreting it to be whatever suits their bias, prejudice, desire or preference.

Take, for instance, the recently concluded Gujarat elections. Notwithstanding the sophistry of the talking heads on TV channels who invariably tailor their “analysis” according to the results, the bottom-line is that no one thing – caste polarisation/consolidation, agrarian crisis, GST, demonetisation, communal appeal, anti-incumbency, etc. – sufficiently explains the result, either in the state as a whole, in different regions or even in different constituencies.

At best what we have is conventional wisdom and a gut feeling of why the result was what it was, which isn’t good enough to explain why, despite all the negatives, the BJP still managed to increase its voteshare and yet ended up with fewer seats – an easy explanation would be the vagaries of the “first past the pole” system but this is also a lazy theory.

Nor does it explain why in some seats caste groups voted one way and in other seats the same caste groups voted the other way. It also doesn’t explain why despite all the reported angst against GST and demonetisation, the BJP won big in seats where these issues should have got maximum traction. And if there was an agrarian crisis, as indeed there was, then why was it not reflected uniformly in electoral behaviour across the state in seats where the farming community decided the outcome.

Also, for all the contrived outrage in the Lutyens’ media and self-proclaimed secularists over references to Pakistan, Aurangzeb and Khilji, it doesn’t seem as though these affected the voting choices of the people in any significant way.

Incidentally, it is still a mystery why the secularists were so horrified over the projection of the tallest Muslim leader of the Congress as the possible chief ministerial candidate. What sort of a secular party would vigorously deny any possibility of their tallest leader in a state becoming CM merely because of his religion?

Be that as it may, now that the polls are over, and analysts will be wiser to what happened, we will probably see some very elegant analyses dripping with disingenuity informing us why the people voted the way they did.

While these analyses will not change the spin that the political parties will put on their performance – the Congress and its cheer-leaders will crow about its “moral victory” that will reinvigorate the party under the leadership of the new party president, and the BJP will parrot the success of its development slogan and pat itself on the back for a sixth straight victory under the formidable Modi-Shah-led election machinery – in their backrooms or war-rooms, both parties should do a more serious and sincere stock-taking of their performance.

If they don’t, and remain in a self-congratulatory mode, they will pay a heavy price for their hubris.

On the other hand, if they seriously analyse the results, then chances are that both parties will probably narrow down on the same thing – economy – on which the Congress will continue to thrust and the BJP will continue to parry in order to win not only more than half-a-dozen state elections in 2018 but also the general elections in 2019.

The Congress clearly smells blood after Gujarat. Regardless of what the BJP says after winning, it did get a bit of a scare in the Gujarat elections. If in the end it all turned out all right for the BJP, then it was in part because they were smart and sensitive enough to sense the breach made by the Congress in its citadel, and managed to retrieve the situation before it could go beyond the point of no return.

This was possible because the Modi-Shah duo is never blasé or complacent about any election. It is all very well for political pundits to claim that PM Narendra Modi’s saturation campaign was a result of the panic in BJP, but the fact is that this is his campaign style.

That it paid dividends is clear. But it is critical that the BJP doesn’t get blind-sided by its success at the hustings. This is because while Mr Modi is clearly the biggest vote-getter for the BJP – people still place their faith and trust in him, in his commitment to do stuff, his untiring efforts to move things along, to bring about the change he promises – the BJP cannot afford to be sanguine about winning 2019 because there is now a visible gap between the dreams he has shown and the delivery on ground.

This is not to say that nothing has happened. If that was the case then the BJP wouldn’t have been winning election after election. The problem is that among the electorate, the sense of well-being is faltering, if not missing.

The reasons for that are the following: while Mr Modi has managed to introduce some big ticket and transformative reforms – GST for instance – the implementation has been botched. The babus might have designed a very elegant model that works well in a sanitised environment (or in lab conditions) but is extremely convoluted, complex and complicated for most people.

The response to the problems faced on GST has been the typical 20^th century bureaucratic one – fiddle with tax rates without bothering to fix what’s causing the problem.

Other great ideas and initiatives like Smart Cities, Skill India and Swachh Bharat don’t really seem to be delivering on the ground. Swachh Bharat, for example, has been reduced to a farce with coiffured women and starched, Fab India kurta wearing ministers wielding brooms for a photo op.

Meanwhile, Swachh Bharat, perhaps the single most important and useful programme of the PM, is very patchy in implementation because there are no systems, procedures and plans for waste management. Skill India also doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The flagship programme, Make in India, doesn’t seem to be taking off. The result is that job creation is lagging behind.

Forget the data churned out by the bureaucracy. There is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that things are not as rosy as they are being projected by the babus. The rule of thumb is that when governments start taking out full-page newspaper ads boasting about how much money has been allocated for this or that scheme, then it normally means that the government has lost the plot.

Because if actually the schemes were working, the government wouldn’t need to advertise their achievements; people would talk about them and results would be visible on the ground. In the final analysis, delivery has to be felt and not just read or heard.

The worst mistake any government can make is to conflate statistics with achievement. Economic jargon sounds great in TV studios but political economy is less about fancy numbers and more about the sense of well-being among the people.

We can keep bandying 8 per cent or 9 per cent growth and throwing numbers like so many crores given in loans, but ultimately what matters are jobs, prices, salaries, opportunities and a general sense that things are improving.

On all of these (except prices), the record is again patchy. This is not surprising because, despite his reputation for being a great demolisher of obstacles that impair the productive capacities of people, the instrument Mr Modi has depended upon for implementing his ideas is the same old bureaucracy which is simply incapable of doing anything constructive, innovative, efficient and people-friendly.

The victory in Gujarat is that of the BJP’s politics, not of its economics. While the organisational strength of the BJP, its formidable election machinery, and the fire in the belly of its leadership for winning elections is a great asset, it is at best only a necessary condition for winning elections.

The Achilles’ heel of the party in the future elections could well be economics. Along with governance, economics is the area which will be make-or-break for the BJP. If it gets this right, it will be unstoppable; if it fails to get the economy moving, then all bets are off.