So what was left to argue with anybody about? Or, at least, that was my excuse for this sabbatical, and my reward, this very unfamiliar freedom from creative tension on Friday afternoons — and of course, from having the opinion page editor pacing up and down my corridor, reminding me of my very patchy record with deadlines.

So what changed now that persuaded me to give up that Friday afternoon freedom? It was change, first a whiff, then the real thing, in what had so far remained rather static national politics post-May ’04. And it wasn’t just who won Punjab and Uttarakhand.

Did you notice an unfamiliar figure in the Akali-BJP swearing-in celebrations? Inder Kumar Gujral. Okay, he, as a votary of Punjab, could justify being there. And the fact that his very amiable and urbane son, Naresh, has been helping and advising the Akalis can simply be explained away as adults being entitled to make their choices. But view this with what happened in Karnataka last year, with Gowda and his son joining hands with the BJP to form the government there, and pushing the “secular” forces to the sidelines.

So, here are two men who had the honour of prime ministership bestowed upon them between 1996 and ’98 only in the name of secularism. If both have now joined hands with “communal” forces, something has changed in our politics. Either the secular Kautilyas, led by Harkishen Singh Surjeet, were wrong in assessing their chosen leaders with secular commitment, or the definition of what is secular and who is communal is changing. Or, could it be that the ideological “untouchability” that has cursed our politics, besides making it so boring and static, is now fading?

I should have sensed this change after a conversation with H.D. Kumaraswamy last year. He said his joining hands with the BJP has no ideological betrayal. Nor did it show any lack of gratitude on his father’s past. Father Gowda, he said, made a mistake by accepting prime ministership in such an arrangement and merely weakened his own party in his state, he said. Regional parties, he said, have to learn from the DMK. They should strengthen their local clout and leverage it at the Centre, irrespective of who leads the ruling coalition there. This, he said, requires clear political focus and ideological nimbleness.

Congress old-timers and their ideological godmen of the Left would obviously dismiss the Gowda-Gujral phenomenon as the capitulation of two former prime ministers desperate to fight off irrelevance. But if the Congress looks around the UPA partners, the picture would look different. With the exception of Lalu Yadav and his RJD, none of the UPA partners treats the BJP or the NDA as untouchable. Almost all have shared power with them, and will do so again if that opportunity presents itself. The kind of communal-secular divide that leftist ideologues believe in and the political untouchability that the Left forces on the Congress and the UPA have, therefore, been overtaken by this change. Except the Congress refuses to see it. It is still so deafened by the rhetoric of the Left and so blinded by the slogans of its own disastrous ’70s that it has chosen to use a ‘minority-ist’ idiom in its political discourse, hoping to win its Muslim vote banks back, while our voters and political parties have moved overwhelmingly towards an ideological centre. The voter now sets much greater store by the quality of governance and the regional parties are fundamentally driven by the ideas of political accommodation and power-sharing. And in the midst of this fascinating change, the Congress is allowing the Left to run not merely its economics, but even its politics. The result is ruinous. From the cities of Maharashtra to Uttar Pradesh (both of which had local polls) and Punjab, Congress has faced a wave of urban anger. The MCD election in the Capital next month will produce an even nastier result in spite of this government notifying a master plan that will ruin the capital. The Congress’s veteran losers and Rajya Sabha spin-doctors can keep whispering to gullible reporters that it was all due to inflation. But it is all the result of lousy, unimaginative, static, lazy, trench-warfare politics. Today’s politics is changing and a party with stakes in more than two states (unlike the Left) has to look at it differently.

India is now entering an era of inclusion, not untouchability and ideological blackballing. Coalition leaders that bind themselves in ideological shackles in such divided parliaments will be made to pay severely for that political bankruptcy.

Almost a quarter century ago, I was covering the crisis in Punjab. Sant Bhindranwale was the extremist, and Sant Longowal the moderate. One openly spoke against the Hindus, the other nuanced it by cursing the “Dilli durbar” instead. But the entire separatist idea was based on the Hindu-Sikh divide. That is why Hindus were systematically pulled out of buses and massacred. But in the villages and the cities of Punjab, the two communities kept their counsel. There were strains but never a fight. That was the Khalistan campaign’s essential failure.

Then came Operation Bluestar, the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the massacres of the Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere, killings of the kind India had — and has still — not seen since Partition. Many of us, who walked the badlands of Punjab and now smelled the burning human flesh in Delhi, thought this was the end. That there would be no reconciliation now, how could Hindus and Sikhs, whose relationship in Punjabi folklore was as inseparable as “nails and fingers”, now live together? I met Sant Longowal, then detained in Udaipur, incognito, and he said he wished for peace to return, but it would never happen in his lifetime, not when the “corpses of thousands of Sikhs are hanging on trees along the highway from Amritsar to Delhi”.

So, in 2007, 23 years after that conversation, if the Akalis and the BJP come together in a ruling alliance in a clean election where 76 per cent come out to vote, and where Akalis fielded seven Hindus and the BJP, four Jat Sikhs, what would you call it? The victory of two cynical rival communal forces? Or the arrival of a new politics, a nationalist alliance that bridges what almost became a disastrous communal divide though not passing the test of classical, ideological secularism. Whichever side you are on, it is a moment to savour, a moment of change, evolution and reconciliation.