They said this round was the 'semi-final', and that the finals in 2014 would be between Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi. The two men campaigned more than any other party leaders in their respective camps. On both sides, there were enthusiasts who could not wait. Some in the Bharatiya Janata Party declared Mr Modi a prime ministerial candidate while the campaigning was still on, as though L K Advani was already history; and businessmen hastened to sing his praises. In the Congress, there is no shortage of people who wait impatiently for the young scion to take charge.
What most people forgot was that, if you want to be in the finals, you have to win the semi-final. Which is why the contest seems to be over before it has begun. Post-elections, Mr Gandhi now has the aura that creates a frisson when he walks into Rashtrapati Bhavan's Durbar Hall, while Mr Modi sits forgotten in Gandhinagar as the BJP re-orders itself and makes way for a new generation.
Indeed, the party's new leader in the Rajya Sabha as well as sundry ideologues now argue that the BJP has to move beyond Hindutva and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and offer a new generation of voters something more in tune with the new India. If true, this must move the party away from all those images of Godhra that Mr Modi is stuck with.
The truth also is that the Congress gets a far higher percentage of the vote in Gujarat (43 per cent) than it does nationally (28 per cent). And since the vote gap with the BJP in the state is just 3.3 percentage points, all that it will take to unseat Mr Modi is a two percentage point swing in the state's vote. It may not seem likely, given how polarised the state has become, but it is not impossible -- and where would that leave Mr Modi?
A victory is complete when you side-step the issues of old and set a new agenda, which is what the Congress has done nationally -- as a reading of the President's address to Parliament on Thursday makes clear. But Mr Modi has so far continued to set the agenda in Gujarat -- refusing to make amends for Godhra while laying claim to transformational achievements, like 14 per cent annual agricultural growth, broadband connectivity in every village, a doubling of the percentage of childbirths in hospitals, and 100 per cent school enrolment of girls, not to mention all those investment figures and Gujarat overtaking Maharashtra as a business magnet.
Some of the claims are open to question; for instance, the annual survey of education done by Pratham shows that girl child enrolment is outstanding, but Gujarat's schoolchildren are among the weakest when it comes to the ability to read and do simple maths, or tell the time. Still, there is no getting away from the fact that Modi's performance on key development indicators has been impressive.
In any case, there are no 'finals' in politics. Neither Arun Jaitley nor Sushma Swaraj, the two new parliamentary leaders of the BJP, has a mass base. Ms Swaraj is a good public orator, Mr Jaitley not even that. Nor is there anyone else on the horizon who can easily replace the Vajpayee-Advani duo. So Mr Modi is certain to be useful to the party when it is campaign time again, which is when he could find himself once again at or near centre stage. But if he has not re-invented himself by then, he might find that history has passed him by and that, for all practical purposes, he was knocked out in the semi-final.
