This is the most weighty question this turn of events has left over the evolving balance of power in our national politics. And its shadow will hang over every political development, every new equation or alliance or arrangement in the run-up to 2009. From a point where both the Congress and the BJP had seemed to be growing, slowly, tantalizingly, building the promise of building rival coalitions with stronger cores in 2009, both are now weakening. The Congress, because it has suborned its political instinct to its desperation to hang on for two more years, and for its continuing nostalgia for the “minority vote”, and the BJP for the utterly bull-headed, management of its politics by a leadership that looks intellectually, morally and even conceptually bankrupt today. In fact, it looks so much like a loser, that practically all its allies have walked away to bide their time on the sidelines as the game is set up for the big final in the summer of 2009.

You ask any senior Congress or BJP leader in private what they foresee in the next Parliament, and you find a unanimity which is scary: a non-Congress, non-BJP coalition of many, probably headed by Mayawati, certainly backed by the Left. This Presidential election has set in motion the churning for the big one a little too early in the tenure of the incumbent. Such a great pity, the two big parties who should at least provide the notion of a centre of gravity in our politics, now look so hopelessly punch-drunk— one in defeat, the other, funnily in victory.