As the results for India's elections wait to be tallied and released on May 16th, one reporter from TIME noted,
"As impressive as the scale of of India's exercise in democracy may be, so is it notable for its almost complete lack of debate over real issues."
Rightly so. This has been primarily because of the extensive domination of the dozens of regional parties in the Indian politics. There are almost 2-3 regional parties in every state, other than the main BJP and Congress. The national elections have been trivialized to hundreds of local elections, with really no substantive issues in the picture. A vast majority of the voters will have voted either because:

1) They were offered money or non-vegetarian food by the local candidate OR
2) They liked the candidate or the party, not bothering to read their manifestos and question their stand on various issues OR
3) They were frustrated with one or more candidate from the other party OR
4) Their village leader/caste leader/community leader TOLD them to go and vote for a particular candidate OR
5) They were forced to vote by a particular candidate at gunpoint

Very few, and that includes very few urban voters, did actually take time to sit and think about who would be a better party at the center. And that is exactly why we are seeing all this mess in Indian politics right now. Nobody cares.

The influence of the regional parties has grown beyond acceptable limits. A nation is like the human body. There is the brain, which is the government, which directs the nation in a particular direction. All other body-parts are needed to OBEY the orders of the brain. In this case, all other organs are tremendously influencing the functioning of the brain and that gives rise to serious disorders, as we are seeing in the Indian polity right now.

In the last 4 years, the Left parties (Communist Party of India etc) won around 60 seats, and were quite influential in implementing their ideology in the functioning of the government. All the progress initiated by the BJP-led government in privatization, deregulation, free markets etc was halted and in some cases, reversed. Small parties like the Samajwadi Party with its 30-odd MPs was capable of bringing down the government (they didnt, but were capable, and they threatened). Coalition politics has acted as a super-barrier in the progress of the nation as a whole.

In the 2014 elections (if not earlier), we may see a rising influence of Mayawati's BSP, Laloo Yadav's RJD, Mulayam's SP and Sharad Pawar's NCP. Unless, something is done about it. Lets hope Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi can manage to pull of the nationalisation of Indian politics