By their actions in the 1998 general elections, Indian voters have delivered a resounding affirmation of the stability and integrity of the system. That they did so in record numbers less than two years after the 1996 election, and in the face of widespread pre-election assumptions of voter apathy, only serves to reinforce the meaning of their mandate. Indeed, it is difficult to overstate the significance of their message.

By any logic of interpretation it is a message of moderation, accommodation and accountability, and it is one that the voters in this federal polity obviously mean to apply to governance and political action both at the Centre and in the states. The expectation is that parties and politicians, both as government and opposition, will see in the mandate of 1998 the potential opportunity these political realities hold for them in the months ahead.

The degree to which that spirit of accommodation and programmatic governance becomes part of the political debate in the late 20th century will determine the direction, form and timing of the transitional phase in which the polity finds itself in 1998.

What some observers took to be an indecisive mandate, was in fact a sophisticated, sensitive and almost clinically selective vote for and against all national and regional parties in most states of the Indian Union, with an equally significant number of winners and losers from among the major players of all parties.

It was a revealing demonstration of the working of democratic electoral politics at the ground level of what is by any definition the most complex social and cultural space on the planet. It was in the ability of parties and politicians to appeal for votes across this complex mix of plural identities, their success or failure in reaching electoral accommodation and alliances and ultimately in building coalitions, that in the end determined the outcome of the 1998 elections.

While those results were dramatic in terms of winners and losers in most states, it is in the percentage of votes cast for the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress on the one hand, and all other parties on the other, and the small shift in seats for the BJP and the Congress, that the true meaning of the mandate can be found.

Apart from the four seats still outstanding at this writing, the BJP went from 161 to 178 seats between 1996 and 1998, and the Congress from 138 seats to 141 seats. All other seats went to regional parties or parties that have in effect become regional. Vote percentages show the Congress moving from 36.5 in 1991 to 28.8 in 1996 and holding at 25.75 in 1998, presumably because of the intervention of Sonia Gandhi.

The BJP, which was at 20.8 and 20.3 in 1991 and 1996 respectively, moved to an almost identical percentage as the Congress in 1998, namely 25.4. All other parties were in single digits. The emergence of two dominant national political forces which can function as government at the Centre in coalition with regional party support is apparent from these figures. It is that reality which is being expressed in the BJP led coalition which has formed the government. And it is the very narrowness of the BJP advantage, imposed by the electorate, which serves to reinforce the mandate of moderation and governance the voters have chosen.

As it turns out, something very similar has happened in Bihar. The BJP-Samata Party alliance gained a six seat advantage over the Rashtriya Janata Dal and its allies in the 1998 vote. Depending on the March 30 outcome in the countermanded Patna constituency, that advantage could go to seven seats should the BJP candidate succeed in displacing the Janata Dal-RJD incumbent. The importance of these results is that, whatever the Patna outcome, they resonate in significant ways with the national mandate, giving the BJP alliance a marginal advantage over the RJD and its allies in Bihar.

While these results were not as dramatic as those in most states of India, they were at least as compelling in the political trends they confirmed and what those trends might mean in the political life of the state, and most particularly in the career of Laloo Prasad Yadav. The former chief minister remains the single most dominant player in Bihar politics. Which helps explain why all politics in Bihar is defined in terms of Laloo Yadav, either for or against.

For eight years he has been and remains the central issue in the political life of the state. It is a populist claim he has legitimately made from the time he assumed the chief ministership in March 1990, to his resignation in June 1997, his arrest in the fodder scandal case in July 1997, to his release on bail in December 1997, and to his winning the Madhepura parliamentary seat against Sharad Yadav, the president of the Janata Dal.

What the 1998 elections reveal is that within this position of state dominance and national influence, Laloo Yadav's electoral base has begun to erode. The process began, interestingly enough, early in 1996 when he was named president of the Janata Dal, and observers began concurring with his own estimate that he was a potential prime minister. But this was also the time that the first revelations about fodder scandal allegations began to be heard outside Bihar.

To understand the pattern at work here, it helps to recall that in the Lok Sabha elections of 1991, the Janata Dal won 32 seats outright in Bihar, and with its National Front-Left Front allies, it controlled 48 of 54 seats. The BJP won five seats in that election, all in Jharkhand, and the Congress one seat in Begusarai. This was a political dominance for the Janata Dal, almost unknown in India's electoral history. The Samata Party was not formed until 1994.

By comparison, in the 1996 parliamentary election the Janata Dal dropped from 32 to 22 of the 54 Lok Sabha seats, the Communist Party of India from eight to four, while the Communist Party of India (Marxist) lost its lone seat, giving the National Front-Left Front combine a total of 26. In the election the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha stood independently and was reduced from six seats to one in the new Parliament. In the meantime, following on Laloo Yadav's chargesheeting in the fodder scandal, the entire left called for his resignation, leaving the chief minister and the Janata Dal with 22 seats in the 11th Lok Sabha, which was by any definition a large come down from the dominance of 1991.

And this pattern was maintained in the October 1996 assembly byelections to replace 10 Janata Dal members of legislative assembly all of whom had won Lok Sabha seats in the May general election. The Janata Dal lost four of those 10 seats, including the prestige seats of Piro and Paliganj to the BJP-Samata Party alliance, and its vote margin was down in four of the six seats it won.

And that trend continued in the 1998 Lok Sabha elections. The suggestion that the RJD 1998 total of 17 seats was somehow a dramatic achievement in "forestalling the BJP advance", misses several fundamental points about Bihar politics. First, it presumes that the RJD began from ground zero which was not the case. When the Janata Dal split in July 1997, Laloo Yadav took with him 16 of the 22 members of parliament. All were RJD candidates in 1998, and only seven, less than half, retained their seats by reduced margins.

Patna with a Janata Dal-RJD incumbent is still outstanding, but in the other 14 central Bihar constituencies, the six Janata Dal-RJD incumbents all lost, four to the Samata Party and two to the BJP. That two of these losses to the Samata Party were in the prestige seats of Arrah and Bikramganj, where the RJD candidates were Chandra Dev Prasad Verma and Kanti Singh, reinforce the argument. Both losing candidates have been in the H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral ministries, and both had the undivided and unequivocal support of Laloo Yadav.

Notably, the former chief minister and former president of the Janata Dal chose to "teach Sharad Yadav a lesson", in Madhepura rather than confront the BJP-Samata Party alliance in any of the prestige seats in the state. Also, his margin of 52,000 in Madhepura was expected. Sharad Yadav, not a Bihari, was a Janata Dal candidate in previous elections at Laloo Yadav's sufferance.

The RJD total of 17 seats is considered notable only by guesstimators and pollsters from New Delhi, who were giving Laloo Yadav as few as 10 seats. No one I spoke with in Bihar in the two months prior to the elections made that mistake. And few in Bihar would be surprised that the BJP-Samata Party alliance increased only from 24 to 29 seats.

The surprise is the wipeout of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, and the increase of the Congress from two to five seats. Two of those five clearly benefitted from the Congress-RJD alliance. With the lone Rashtriya Janata Party seat this gives Laloo Yadav's RJD alliance a total of 23, the BJP-Samata Party then has 29, with Ram Vilas Paswan's Janata Dal seat in Hajipur bringing the total to 53 decided seats.

Among the winners and losers, the biggest hit was taken by the Janata Dal, which lost five of the six seats which did not go with Laloo Yadav, the CPI, which lost all four of its seats, and the JMM, which lost its only seat. The net advantage of these losses went to the BJP-Samata Party alliance and the Congress.

In the end, the lines were drawn between those who supported Laloo Yadav and those who opposed him, and it is clear as it has been since 1996, that the BJP-Samata Party alliance was the primary anti-Laloo formation in Bihar in the 1998 elections. It is a point now widely conceded, including by Laloo Yadav's opponents on the left who are obviously not a part of the alliance. The BJP-Samata Party alliance has in a very real sense filled the political space opened by the weakening of Laloo Yadav's dominance of 1991. It is a pattern not unlike that in the wider politics of the nation in 1998.