If there was any single message delivered by India's huge electorate last month, it was that people do not like the way that anybody - whether in the ruling Congress-I or the opposition - was governing them.
Throughout the country, candidates ran against the incumbents by accusing them of corruption, incompetence and nepotism. And almost everywhere, the voters agreed and threw the incumbents out.The most dramatic rejection was of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his Congress-I party. The party's overwhelming strength in the lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha, was more than halved as it was routed from power nationally.
But while the opposition parties prevailed on the national level, they took a drubbing in almost every state where they held power. Across southern India, several major opposition leaders were toppled. And though Congress-I was rejected across its stronghold in northern India, it was welcomed back across the opposition stronghold in the south.
Many attribute this "throw the rascals out" attitude to a general revulsion against what many believe is rampant official corruption.
With remarkable candor, Gandhi acknowledged during the campaign that only a fraction - he said 15 percent - of the government funds allocated to villagers ever reached them. The rest, he said, went to corrupt officials, middlemen and unscrupulous contractors.
Against this background of everyday corruption, the AB Bofors arms-procurement scandal - in which the Swedish arms firm paid $50 million in commissions or bribes to helpful, but as yet unnamed, Indian officials - came to symbolize corruption in the highest levels of the Congress-I party.
The integrity of the prime minister and his family was called into question, and Gandhi felt compelled to stand up in Parliament and deny receiving any Bofors money. But his denials never seemed convincing, and many still believed he was involved either in the bribe-taking or in a subsequent cover-up.
There seems to be no pressure to modify India's generally non-aligned foreign policy or to change its democratic institutions.