A moveable feast
A mellow sun greeted us as we rolled into Delhi a little after midday. Eight cities, 8,000km (5,000 miles) and 18 days later, we are back to where we began our journey. It will take time to return to the normal rhythm of life; the rhythm of train life is different.
All of life is a journey, but this has been a truly special one. Travelling with colleagues from all over the world, we discovered shared language and culture. When the train pulled out of Delhi, Yusuf, my colleague from the Somali service, was the first to be surprised. He ran into my compartment and pointed to the ubiquitous neem tree by the tracks. "What do you call that tree, what is the name?" he asked. "It's in every home in Mogadishu. They call it the tree from India." There were many such serendipitous discoveries on our journey.
And then there were our travels into the many Indias, its cities and villages. There we met people and their leaders to try to make some sense of the general elections. I found a clear schism in the way the New India of the thriving cities and the Old India of the struggling villages are thinking.
In the cities, people appear to be exasperated by the fragmentation of politics and growing regional and caste politics. At the same time, there is a fatalistic acceptance of fractured verdicts, messy coalitions and horse-trading. In the villages, the talk is largely about aspiring to a minimum quality of life: a primary school, electricity for a few hours a day, a tar road. So, in the countryside, the general election has become an extension of the municipal or village council elections. Basic needs matter where people have little.
That explains the rousing turnout so far - between 52% and 59% in the first four phases of the polls. (India is voting in the fifth and final phase as I write this.) Old India must have voted more than the New India, as is always the case.
Many of India's politicians fail to understand this. A colleague spun a metaphor about India's two trains - the fast one carrying the rich and the middle class, and the slow one carrying the poor - to the railway minister Laloo Prasad Yadav in Patna, and wondered how the gap could be bridged. In reply, Mr Yadav droned on about the various trains he ran. "There are suburban trains for local people, there are passenger trains, there are express trains..." If it is all about putting together an ugly patchwork quilt of a government at any cost, do the politicians really need to care about the people?
This brings back a troubling thought. Has the meaning of democracy in India been reduced only to signify elections and then tom-tom it to the rest of the world? "In any modern democracy," writes , "elections are a part of a larger set of rules and practices designed to authorise the state, but in India they are carrying the entire burden of society's aspirations to control its opportunities." Because the state fails to fulfil its duties, things are bad.
There are also growing worries about criminalisation and "corruption" of politics in this bourgeois democracy: in many places, we found people talking about political parties selling seats to the highest bidder, usually a rich trader or real estate agent. One paper carried a story of a brand new BMW car being spotted in a garage of a small regional party chief of modest means. The car vanished a day after the story appeared, the paper reported.
It may be instructive to return to Mr Khilnani, possibly the most incisive commentator on the idea of India.
"The conflicts in India today are the conflicts of modern politics; they concern the state, access to it, and to whom it ultimately belongs," he says.
"Within a very short time, India has moved from being a society in which the state had for most people a distant profile and limited responsibilities, and where only a few had access to it, to one where state responsibilities have swollen and everyone can imagine exercising some influence upon it."
For me, I am just happy to be home. On the way out of the station, I looked back to see our train for the last time. I realise I have grown fond of the red and white express: the two-tier meeting car with its green plastic-covered berths, the first class sleeping cars with their musty red carpets, fusty upholstery, a regulation Incredible India poster, a small table, the dark fogged windows and dodgy door handles. As it tore through the night, the sleeping car sometimes rattled and shuddered, but I would usually sleep well. Next day, I would be ready to face another place, another people. I will miss it.
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