I was not surprised by the victory of the BJP-led Mahayuti in Maharashtra. Or rather, I was not surprised by the failure of the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) to win an election that it should have easily won. Yet I simply cannot fathom the tsunami-like scale of this victory. Neither the political common sense nor the technical political science helps me make sense of the final outcome of this race. I cannot but ask: Was the winner on steroids?

This is a grave matter. Any serious questioning of the official election outcome must pass some prima facie credibility tests: Is there something big and substantial that needs explaining? Are available explanations hopelessly inadequate? Let us examine both these.

The Maharashtra election presents us with a four-fold surprise. First of all, there is the jaw-dropping margin of Mahayuti’s victory: Over three-fourths of seats and a 14 per cent lead in terms of vote share. Such victories are rare, but not impossible, nor unheard of. What adds to the surprise is the near disappearance of all the known patterns of Maharashtra politics. It is as if a hidden hand has levelled the huge regional, urban/rural or within-coalition party-wise differences that have always existed in Maharashtra. The third element of the surprise is the dramatic nature of this turnaround: From a 17-30 defeat for the Mahayuti in Lok Sabha to 235-50 victory in the assembly, from a vote share deficit of 1 percentage point to a lead of 14 points, within five months. This too is not entirely unprecedented in Indian electoral history.

What makes it truly unprecedented is that this reversal was in an unexpected direction. Reversals of election verdicts between national and state elections are associated with the success of national parties in national elections (BJP in Rajasthan, MP, Chhattisgarh in 2019) or regional parties in state elections (Janata Dal in Karnataka in 1985,........

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