Honestly, the takeaway from this election should be that ~75% of votes were cast for one of the two main alliances. I don't think anything like that has ever happened, except when the Janata party rose to oppose Indria, and even then it was a unique circumstance. Its also the clearest sign that:
-We are in a new political era
-The FPTP squeeze is coming for india
-Localists need to start picking sides.
Actually one huge factor in what has just happened appears to be that a lot of alliances between opposition parties backfired big time, to the benefit of the BJP. With the exception of the BSP they would probably all have won more seats had they run alone.
By alliances here do you mean seat-allotments or party blocks? The later only really hurt JD(S), SP, and AIADMK, but some of these were always going to get punished. In that case then it makes sense if seats were divided up in between opposition blocks - the BJP has the best brand and will win a good number of 1 v 1 races with whomever. But if the INC brand starts improving in the future, then there really is little space left for third parties unless they hitch their horse to the big two.
Alliances often backfire because parties incorrectly assume that the base voters of another party will automatically transfer their votes to their candidates when, in practice, many Yadavs clearly prefer the BJP to the BSP and certainly many non-Yadav OBC who might prefer the SP to the BJP prefer the BJP to the BSP. The same applies for Jatavs and non-Jatav Dalits, of course.
Because Indian politics is largely about clientalism and caste, alliances can easily backfire. Voters often have little reason to be loyal to an alliance - they might vote for Party X, not because they have faith in Party X, but due to a weak preference for Party X's caste alignment. In this case, it's easy to see why this kind of voter might not transfer their vote!
