The distribution showed the so-called "Brahmin-Bania party" of yore got at least partial support from Other Backward Classes, Dalits and Muslims.
For the Congress, the vagaries of first-past-the-post meant that its 20 per cent of the vote translated into only 45-odd seats for family and friends. That's less than half the 116 seats the BJP got with its 19 per cent vote share in 2009. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) will get zero seats, despite polling the third-largest number of votes (more than 21 million).
As the old saw goes, victory has many fathers and defeat is an orphan. No doubt many wise men will dissect the multiple variables that contributed. Disgust with the family and its patrician, disconnection from the aam aadmi, three years of stagflation, Narendra Modi's ability to project the achievements of the Gujarat sarkar, the clever way in which Amit Shah exploited the polarisation of Muzaffarnagar, etc.
To me, this election was always about demography. There were 150 million voters getting their first crack at a Lok Sabha ballot. Whoever won the youth mandate would win the election. The BJP has received a very large share of the youth vote and cut across caste/communal lines in that age cohort.
This may have also settled the long-standing debate about "jobs versus entitlement". To recap, in 2004, the BJP called an election six months early, pegged its campaign around "India Shining", and lost. The economy had indeed started pulling out of a multi-year recession. But it was still jobless growth in May 2004. Both major parties came to the wrong conclusion - they assumed voters wanted entitlements, and not growth.
As it turned out, the next few years saw gross domestic product (GDP) growth accelerate due to global factors, while the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) built a regime around handouts like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). In 2009, the UPA won its second term and assumed entitlements had done the trick and added on the food security Bill and yet more subsidies. It wasn't the entitlements that won the 2009 elections; it was growth and the earning opportunities that came with it. That only became obvious when the growth variable was removed, circa 2011, while the entitlements remained.
There was a big clue in the demographic data. India was, and is, in the middle of the biggest migration in human history. Tens of millions of young people have headed out of villages and into cities. Each urban migrant is implicitly rejecting MGNREGA in looking for some form of urban employment. The last three years, those earning opportunities have been fewer. Yet the migration has not stopped, indicating where the aspirations lie.
The emphasis on "vikas" has won over that demographic. Mr Modi has a big mandate; he can select the team he wants. Those kids will idolise him - if he delivers. If he cannot, the flip side of public adulation would come into play.
In 2008 and 2011, the boys and girls who voted for the BJP in 2014 drowned Yuvraj Singh (another man with an impressively broad chest) in a tsunami of adulation as he played a lead role in the World Twenty20 and the World Cup. In 2014, those fans stoned Singh's house when he failed. The expectations centred on the BJP are almost as high as the expectations centred on the cricket XI.
Twitter: @devangshudatta