Last week, India embarked on what has repeatedly been hailed as the biggest electoral exercise in history. But the bigger grinding noise seemed to come from hundreds of electoral pundits as they cranked up the machinery of received ideas. India's future, these portentous commentators declared, would be decided by the winner of the three-way clash between Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal. Or the older battle between secularism and Hindu nationalism. Or the one between free-market capitalism and socialism.
But from where I stood one evening in the parliamentary constituency of Gurgaon, 60 km south of New Delhi, the ambitious editorialists and smooth-tongued television pundits seemed oblivious to the deeper drama of this election. In nearby Dharuhera lies one of the auspicious sites of India's economic liberalization, and the fault line between the rural and the urban that is redefining Indian politics.
Rising real estate prices in Gurgaon, the corporate hub that enjoys the third-highest per-capita income in the country, sent speculators and industrialists flooding into the once-rural area of Dharuhera. The biggest local landowner transformed himself into a real estate speculator. Factories employed cheap labor from nearby villages, releasing their low-caste residents from the curse of feudal bondage. As we drove down the road from New Delhi, a shopping mall, with a Benetton outlet, announced Dharuhera's imminent arrival in the world of high-end consumerism.