With trends in all 223 assembly constituencies out as the clock gets set to strike midday hour, the 116 vs 37 vs 41 vs 12 story had a tale to tell.

That’s the leads of the four main parties in fray to shape the state assembly post-polls — the Congress, BJP, Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) and Karnataka Janata Paksha (KJP), floated by former BJP strongman-turned-CM-turned-rebel-turned-oustee BS Yeddyurappa.

The figures tell us not to look for signs of any bigger picture in this picture. If there is one, the electorate will draw afresh in 2014, or whenever the Lok Sabha elections take place.

While the Congress is already singing the hosanna to Rahul Gandhi, claiming that he has stumped the BJP with the corruption card, the BJP’s comeback line is plain bluster and bulldoze: this won’t impact 2014. Former Karnataka chief minister and JD(S) leader HD Kumaraswamy, meanwhile, told CNN-IBN that the media was responsible for pushing voters towards the Congress, and that the party would continue to fight the Congress and expose corruption, while Yeddyurappa and company in the KJP would be mighty happy at just having tripped their former party.

But a couple of thousand kilometres from Bangalore, as heat gathers in parliament over multiple corruption cases, and the supreme court gets set to announce its observation on at least one impropriety, if not corruption, it might just be wrong to assume the voters in Karnataka gave either a thumb up or down to the C word.

Rahul Gandhi might have called the BJP government in the state a rank bad mark — it created a “world record” in corruption and the saffron party won the 2008 elections with help of the Reddy brothers of Bellary, referring to the mining barons in the dock for multiple cases, the Congress vice-president had said at an election rally on April 26 — but May 5 was hardly the judgment day on sleaze and fraud.

If it was, the first and last figures in the first line would not have been so dominating. The Congress, with 116 leads, and the KJP, on way to open accounts in 12, would not have got the pat on the back from the electorate if it was a ruling against corruption. For, if Rahul Gandhi looked at it dispassionately enough, the Karnataka government certainly failed to pip the UPA government led by the Congress to the post in that world championship bout over corruption. And that Karnataka government that got Gandhi’s stamp of approval on the corruption index was led primarily by KJP’s Yeddyurappa for most part since 2008, and those precisely were the parts when most corruption cases came to light.

So, lessons from the Karnataka results: # 1: corruption matters little on most occasions in the way we vote.

# 2: bad governance gets people goat on most occasions, and they vote for the alternative — and not always en masse.

# 3: let’s stop trying to draw lessons from elections and try to recognise each one for their uniqueness.