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Welcome to the IGE2014 series. Around June 2013, when Narendra Modi was anointed the head of the BJP campaign for the Indian General election of 2014, I decided to write an account of the happenings around the election. The result of the effort is a series of 4 books:

Book 1: The Indian General Election of 2014 (First Published September 21, 2013 on Amazon Kindle), available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FBZJFN2

Book 2: Numbers. Forecasting the Indian General Election of 2014 (First Published December 21, 2013 on Amazon Kindle), available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HG6YG0Q

Book 3: Wrath of the Gods: The Aam Aadmi Party in the Indian General Election of 2014 (First Published January 31, 2014 on Amazon Kindle), available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I5CHU4Y

Book 4: The Result of the Indian General Election of 2014 (First Published May 31, 2014 on Amazon Kindle), available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KOS9FPE

These books were published individually, and the first three of these four books were published before the election concluded. Together, these works constitute an as-it-happened account of the events related to the Indian General Election of 2014. It is therefore an account of the main participants, their character and their motivations. Naturally, this book also contains a detailed analysis of the forces that drive Indian politics and the mechanisms through which those forces translate into action.

‘Numbers. Forecasting the Indian General Election of 2014’ was the second book is my series on the Indian General Election of 2014, and I refer to it as Book 2. It was first published on December 21, 2013 and I have since made minor modifications to the text to make it read better. The analysis and its implications are as they were on that day.

Book 2 is a very neatly focused endeavor to just get to the numbers. My belief in writing Book 2 was that only after we have a good idea of the numbers do we get a good sense of the results. As of December 2013 IGE2014 was still fairly open, though it was taken for granted by most observers that the Congress had all but dropped out of the race. As you will see in the analysis conducted in Book 2, about 200+ seats were still to be had through the application of enterprise and cunning. There were still six months to go.

Consequently Book 2 is starkly divided. The first part of the book sets out the boundaries of what I consider is the ‘decided’ part of the election. The second part outlines the areas that were then still open to contest, and what it would take to win them. Book 2 has a short analysis on where the central electoral battles of IGE2014 were to be fought, and also a clear statement of what the expected result from each of these battles was. Thus, Book 2 was not just a forecast, it was a datum. Using my expectations as set out in Book 2, I could measure objectively my success or failure as a forecaster.

And, using my thesis on the key battlegrounds, I could sit in judgment over the successes and failures of each of the key players in IGE2014. Book 2 enabled me to ground many of the interesting questions about IGE2014 in a firm mathematical framework. For example: Was Rahul successful in Karnataka? Did Raj Thackrey derail the BJP in Maharashtra? Was Modi decisive in UP? Was Nitish right on Bihar? Was there a Modi wave at all? What was AAP’s impact? All these questions could be answered precisely and mathematically once the analysis in Book 2 was done, and indeed, I have answered these questions in Book 4.