1. Unless the Congress reinvents itself by setting aside its obsession with dynasty politics and returning to its ideological roots, its days are numbered, argues Mohammed Ayoob in The Hindu. 
  2. The Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party coalition, backed by the Scheduled Castes and other backward classes, was deemed an unassailable social coalition. So what explains the success of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh? Academic and writer Badri Narayan analyses the situation in the Indian Express. 
  3. There is no shortage of cheerleaders for this verdict, but for democracy to function, the sceptics have to find their voice, Hartosh Singh Bal had written in Caravan in 2014.  We will all have to recognise that no mandate is a mandate to silence opposition. Neither is this mandate reason to silence oneself. Here’s what he had to say about the 2019 results.
  4. Election results invite questions for liberals. Worldwide, they lack their rivals’ discipline and close ranks too late. Academic Christophe Jaffrelot writes in Indian Express on the trend of the receding liberal political influence in the aftermath of the Lok Sabha elections. 
  5.   While Chandrababu Naidu was battling the BJP at the Centre, Jagan Mohan Reddy was nursing the anti-incumbency sentiment in the state one step at a time.Charan Teja and Nitin B in The News Minute on the YSR Congress’s landslide win in Andhra Pradesh. 
  6.   More than the danger of an obvious constitutional imbalance, what should be frightening about the Lok Sabha verdict is that this ancient nation of ours, with more than two thousand years of civilisational rectitude and resilience behind it, and with seven decades of democratic robustness, can be made to feel so insecure and so vulnerable as to embrace, joyfully and wilfully, an authoritarian prophet, writes Harish Khare in The Hindu. 
  7.   In most parts of the country, the BJP is the darling of the aspirational urban middle class. The south is the only exception. Nearly every major urban centre in Tamil Nadu has voted against the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-BJP alliance, notes C Lakshmanan in Mint. 
  8. With the BJP-RSS creating a Hindutva wave, the struggle to preserve the Constitution’s core values will intensify, writes Manoranjan Mohanty in Business Line. 
  9.   In the Hindustan Times, Roshan Kishore crunches the numbers to show the effect of the Modi wave on the Lok Sabha elections. 
  10. The Congress is an obstacle to those who want to build an alternative, argues Yogendra Yadav in Indian Express. A large mainstream party acts like a magnet that catches a lot of energy around it. So, even when the Congress is unable to defeat the BJP, it ends up diverting and diffusing a lot of the energy that gets drawn to it.  (But Suhas Palshikar disagrees.)