IHT presents an argument against the widespread over-simplification that Congress' victory is due to the growing "rural-urban" divide:

In India, unlike China, it is not self-evident that the poor rural areas subsidize the rich urban ones. To the contrary, Indian government heavily subsidizes the agricultural sector while imposing numerous "luxury taxes" on the urban rich. While it is true that India's agriculture needs further investment to improve it's land productivity, this year, in any case, rural areas were mostly prospering, albeit perhaps temporarily, from a combination of good crops and stable to higher farm prices.

So why were the poor unhappy with the BJP ?

I think the argument offered by most commentators regarding access of TV in villages bringing a "rich-poor" divide to their huts is over-simplification.

Given the complexity of the regional, caste and class interest parties that make up India’s body politic, no simple explanation of electoral events is possible. In northern India in particular, rural voters are divided more by caste than united by demand for more resources.

An increasingly predictable feature of the latest result was the defeat of incumbent governments, both Congress and BJP led ones, in the states as well as at the center. The Congress Party team governing Karnataka, was defeated as surely as that in neighboring Andhra Pradesh, whose chief minister, Naidu, was a high-profile technology promoter aligned with the BJP. It seems more likely that these two state governments lost because they were incumbents than because they did not pay sufficient attention to rural needs.

At the national level, Congress may have been helped by a rejuvenation of the Gandhi name by a new generation of the family (Rahul & Priyanka) and rejection of the ‘‘foreign’’ label that the BJP had tried to pin on Sonia Gandhi.

But more broadly the election may simply show that:

a) voters still exercise their rights
b) they take a suitably cynical view of politicians
c) do not believe their promises
d) unwilling to let any of them stay in office too long.

Indonesian voters seemed to deliver a rather similar verdict last month to the two main parties as well as to President Megawati Sukarnoputri. There, as in India, rural voters predominate, but in crowded Java, at least, the geographical divide between town and country is less clear and everywhere ideological, regional and religious affiliations transcend any politics based on rural issues. In the Philippines, the urban poor are as numerous as their rural cousins. Economics might demand that agriculture receive much more attention. But electoral politics is all about personalities and avoids policy issues. Rural issues barely get lip service.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is in more developed Thailand and Malaysia that rural voters are a better defined electoral class. In Thailand, where rural voters are still the majority and the gap between Bangkok and the countryside is very wide, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra triumphed in the last election partly because of a promise of rural handouts and debt reduction for farmers. In Malaysia, rural voters matter because they are mostly Malays in areas where the battle for the Malay soul between the governing UMNO and Islamist opposition is most intense. In the recent election, sky high palm oil prices were worth a lot of votes for UMNO but they were not the substance of the political debate. Rural voters still predominate in most of Asia and they decide elections. But they do not define the political issues, least of all as an urban-rural divide.