The electorate puts their hands up...

Defeat. The ingnominy not as much as the shock, perhaps, for LK Advani. The perennial Lakshman of the BJP seems to have trouble crossing the last rekha into the Prime Minister's office himself...

The last two decades have been, to say the least, interesting in Indian Politics... the fall of the India.INC, the subsequent rush of people occupying the vaunted chair (as many as 6 in one decade) and the rise, rise and fall of the BJP. The third innings of the INC has found favor with India again, the voters showing us that sometimes, who we vote for is as much a product of our textbooks and bedtime stories as it is of performance.

The Congress, to be quite fair, is like a Noblewoman with a very large train... the "dynasty" has such a fine, studded history that any lesser leader donning the gown would invariably trip, fall and make a mockery of themself. So after a prolonged period of finding someone good enough to fill in the post of captain, they just decided to cut their losses. So they take that nice, decorated gown, put it up in 10 Janpath, and become just another party with "flexible ideologies", but with an illustrious background that, this being India, guarentees them so many votes every time.

LK Advani, on the other side, has looked very much a lost man. Vajpayee was lucky, in a way, that his prime ministiership was supported by a very cohesive, structured and focused party leadership, credit going in no small amount to Advani himself. But the best of things have a strange way of blowing up in your face, and Indian Voters have a habit of blowing up the best of things. So as the NDA fell, BJP crashed, their flamboyant young leader was tragically killed, their flamboyant senior leader caled it quits, a lackluster party president came into favour, and all of a sudden, the venerable Lakshman, chanting "Ram,Ram", understood what a blindfolded man in freefall must feel like. To take the past and future away from a man, and muck up most of the present, was not really setting the stage for a victory 5 years on.

And so it is, that today, as recession washes up on our shores, that the Aam Aadmi seems to have taken note. Every political analyst mourning the ignorance of the electorate seems to be mistaken, for the geo-political map of India now seems to say, Saffron is too expensive to be given more than a sprinkling, and in dire times, we will trust the Hand at the end of our own arm, even if it IS after our hearts.