The last time we Limousine Liberals, a motley collection of journalists, TV anchors, business tycoons, psephologists, economists and bankers that often travels together to watch most major elections visited this state was also at the peak of summer, in the general elections of 2004. And, even though the geography we then covered was at the other end of the state, the landscape was rather similar. Land had just been harvested and bundles of a bountiful wheat crop lay neatly for as far as you could see. But similarities are only physical because there is change in the political landscape.

MY jottings from May 2004, were mostly pessimistic (‘Seizure in the Heartland’, May 1, www.expressindia.com). The fundamental cause of despair was how Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were voting along caste combinations and thereby bucking the spectacular national wave of anti-incumbency. This frozen voting behaviour, I had then bemoaned, was responsible for the frozen nature of the heartland’s politics. This way, people of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were allowing their leaders to take them for granted, because they could safely presume they wouldn’t lose if they didn’t perform and they wouldn’t win any bigger if they did. And people voted this way before because they had no real hope from anybody. If nobody is going to improve my bijli, sadak, paani, schools, hospitals and law and order anyway, then why should I bother to change anything? The least I can do is to keep my caste cousin in power. That was the despair of the summer of 2004.

... contd.