I cannot yet tell you who will rule UP, come mid-May. All I can tell you is what anybody would tell you, quite safely, that the state is heading for a hung assembly. But I will stick my neck out this time and tell you that change is in the air. I also have a vested interest in making that claim — and wishing that it stands the test of these seven rounds of voting — because I need it as evidence for my new political theory. That the vote in India is now moving back towards the “centre” of our politics. That the post-1989 “aberration” — where the state not merely got divided but fractured into so many regional, sub-regional and caste-based parties — is now ending. That the use-by date on the AJGARs, the MAJGARs, the KHAMS, the MYs and so on is now getting over. We saw it in Bihar last year when most smaller parties and independents got wiped out, resulting in a clear NDA/UPA division. You saw it in Punjab this year, when the Congress lost despite improving its vote by five percentage points — because the Akali-BJP combine increased by 9 per cent. And where did these votes come from? They mostly came from “others” which declined from 24 to 11 per cent. These also included some significant others like the BSP and the Left. Independents losing out has been a growing trend for a decade now. The movement away from narrow-focus, caste or sub-regional politics is a new phenomenon altogether. If it grows, it can stitch back together a polity left in tatters by the mandir-masjid or mandal-kamandal politics.

... contd.