That's what Jaipur woke up to this week four wards, a few broken voting machines and one truly loud political argument that became the hottest one in the Rajasthan municipal elections on Thursday afternoon. The Congress swept all four wards of the Jaipur Municipal Corporation in the State Election Commission ordered repolling, and the party state president Govind Singh Dotasra did not miss an opportunity to shoot a hole in the BJP's chest-thumping over what it termed as a "massive majority" in the civic body elections.

Even for the standards of a Rajasthan political culture that is known for its personal nature, Dotasra's language was aggressive. He has charged the BJP of using vote rigging and power manipulation to take away the people's mandate in a few constituencies and had even gone so far as to claim that the Election Commission knew that Congress was ahead in these constituencies and that technical glitches were being cited on its orders to withhold results. But he didn't end there. Municipal boards are set to elect mayors and chairpersons starting from next week, and so the BJP is now relying on the police and administration to bully the new councillors as it hopes to retain the boards despite the setback, Dotasra alleged, which, whether true or false, is a staple of opposition mythology that has been circulating in India's municipal bodies for years.

The figures behind the shrill cacophony are worth stating explicitly, since they challenge the easy narrative each side would like to promote. The civic battle in Jaipur was never a no-holds-barred affair. The BJP won 95 wards and the Congress 43, with the remaining dozen going to other candidates, including a dozen independents, a comfortable victory for the ruling party in the state capital in the event that the final count took place after Thursday's Congress victory at the edges of the city, where 723 candidates contested 150 wards and turnout was just over 63 per cent. For Dotasra, the inconvenient arithmetic is the four wards, though symbolically charged, are not enough to compensate for a nearly two to one seat advantage in the city that is the fulcrum of Rajasthan's politics.

However, zoom out to the state level and the situation becomes more complex, and BJP's "massive majority" begins to look like a big white elephant. Voting took place in 245 wards in two phases on 9th and 11th September across 309 urban local bodies, the largest municipal voting since last full civic cycle in Rajasthan. The BJP had won around 4,171 wards as compared to the Congress getting 3,597, leaving less than 600 seats out of more than 10,000 wards contested by the BJP. Independents alone topped the list with more than 2,200 wards and smaller groups like the RLP, AAP, BAP, BSP and CPI(M) shared the remaining ones.

That is a true vote winner for the ruling party, but it's a working majority, not a landslide as the term "massive majority" suggests. It was much rougher in the mid-sized cities that don't get quite the same level of attention as the capital: Congress secured both Ajmer and Pali and came close in Jodhpur South and Kota South, and even captured a BTVP bastion in Jhalawar, winning 29 out of 45 wards there. It was the third party that emerged as the king makers in places such as Bharatpur, not either of the national parties.

It is not just a political issue but an economic one as well, as the budgets of the municipal boards of Rajasthan run into hundreds of crores of rupees every year ranging from the collection of property tax, contracts for water and sanitation to tenders for street lighting and building approvals, and increasingly the responsibility for the state's share of the grants from the Fifteenth Finance Commission for urban development under schemes. That's why both parties are doing everything they can to fill their seats with councillors who, in normal times, would be out of the pages of the local news. A municipal chief in a city as large as Jaipur is also a launching pad: the mayor's office has historically provided a pipeline to assembly seats and control over the patronage mechanism is just as crucial to the turnout machinery for the larger struggle ahead.

The repolling deserves more attention than either side has publicly offered it. These four wards in Jaipur were asked to redo the voting by the Election Commission on technical problems in voting machines, a reason that the Congress has now come out against as a cover story, saying the glitch was to its advantage because of its ruling party winning the elections. The BJP had made no detailed rebuttal of these specific charges other than the general claim of the civic results being a vindication of the first two years of the Bhajanlal Sharma government and there is no independent verification of Dotasra's allegations of administrative manipulation so far.

The next few events will speak louder than the war of words to date. The new councillors, elected in the state's Municipal Corporation Elections (MCEs), have been set to elect mayors and board chairpersons on Sept 21, with the deputy mayors and vice-presidents a day later, where the independents will determine which side to support in ward-level board after board.