The current ruling party, the Congress Party, won an unheard-of majority of the votes. Since India has a parliamentary democracy, this means that Manmohan Singh, the current Prime Minisiter, gets to keep his job.
Elections are often a referendum on the current state of affairs. The fact that the Congress Party won so many votes suggests that most voters are very pleased with India's development and progress over the past six years.
Notable exceptions: Vidarbha, an agricultural region where, apparently, crop failure and debt obligations have led to the suicides of more than 5000 farmers since 2004. (This area voted in large chunks for the Congress' major rival)
Also of note: the number of registered criminals in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) went from 128 to 150. Apparently many dons find politics to be an ideal day job. Their criminalrecords are no big secret, but people vote for them anyway (perhaps because they're afraid of the consequences of not doing so.) A notable exception: in Bihar, long mocked as India's most backward and crime-ridden state, every single criminal mastermind who contested the elections lost. Perhaps this is because Bihar's Chief Minister has been coming down hard on crime.
On a personal note: one of the men who works in our building is from a village in Bihar. He recently changed his vote from Lalu Yadav (the previous Chief Minister) to Nitish Kumar, the current one. When asked why, he said that he liked what Nitish had done for his own small town: since the new government had come into power, the road into town had been paved.
Who says politics has nothing to do with daily life? In India, that is definitely not the common perception.
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