Over roughly sixty months, the Nifty rose nearly seven times — from about 1,000 to around 6,000, with the Sensex climbing close to 700%. It was the infrastructure-led boom, its euphoria captured in legends like Punj Lloyd, which went from a ₹10 IPO to a ₹700 re-IPO and eventually back to ₹10.

But the part rarely told: every six months the index corrected by more than 10%. The swings were so violent — up 10%, down 6%, up 12% — that most traders still lost money, shaken out by the very volatility that produced the century-defining gains.

The Vajpayee-led NDA campaigned on 'India Shining' and every poll pointed to victory. The results delivered the opposite: the BJP lost. A surprise of that size had a violent price tag — the Nifty fell roughly 30% in the post-election sessions.

The episode is the cleanest lesson in the entire series about elections: markets do not react to results, they react to surprises. And the irony is part of the legend — after that 30% shock, the Nifty rallied four to five times into the 2007 peak. The worst election crash in history became one of the greatest buying opportunities.

The government launched a follow-on public offer of ONGC worth roughly ₹40,000 crore without reading the secondary-market mood. It attracted less than ₹1,000 crore — a shortfall of about ₹39,000 crore that threatened to sink the issue.

Into the gap stepped LIC, the state's life insurer, which subscribed to the entire shortfall so the issue could go through. It was the first appearance of 'LIC as market saviour' — a role the institution would replay in 2013 and 2015, and one that would carry a dark irony when LIC itself listed years later and needed saving.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram abolished the long-term capital gains tax in 2004 — and replaced it with the Securities Transaction Tax, a levy on every trade, paid whether the trader made a profit or a loss. The rationale was efficiency: collecting tax at the source.

It became the single most-criticised levy in Indian trading history. Options STT would later be hiked fivefold, from 0.1% to 0.5%, over the following years — a long trend that eventually culminated in a 150% hike in 2026. You cannot understand 2018, 2024 or 2026 without the 2004 seed this event planted.