Yet another election has drawn to a close this past weekend and India has a brand new government. For Bangalore, India’s technology hub, its modern face, its brand in the outside world, a familiar story is unfolding.

Not for the first time, Bangalore (and Karnataka) finds itself at complete odds with the national voting trends. The city has been swept by the Bharatiya Janata Party whereas Congress Party-led UPA alliance has won an equally one-sided victory in many states and will rule the country.

So even as a huge deficiency of infrastructure slowly crushes the city and a faltering economy simultaneously skims off jobs across many sectors, Bangalore’s citizens are ruing their political luck. Many attribute the city’s many developmental challenges to Bangalore’s (and Karnataka’s) dysfunctional voting pattern. For decades, it is almost a predictable theme — Bangalore votes one way while India votes another.

In this very election, contrast Bangalore with Delhi which overwhelmingly voted for the Congress, Kolkata where the Trinamool-Congress UPA alliance prevailed, Mumbai where the NCP-Congress UPA alliance won and Chennai where the UPA partner DMK triumphed. “Once again, it appears that we will have nobody to represent Bangalore’s agenda to New Delhi in a clear way,” says Rajeev Gowda, a professor at IIM Bangalore whose aspirations for a Congress Party ticket in South Bangalore were thwarted.

While politicians like Chandrababu Naidu of Andhra Pradesh and successive chief ministers in Tamil Nadu whether J. Jayalalithaa or M Karunanidhi have extracted maximum benefit from aligning and negotiating with Delhi and extracting portfolios and resources, “Bangalore and Karnataka are losing out because of the mismatch,” says Gowda.

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