AGE OF SATRAPS

If the centre cannot hold, things fall apart-goes the line. But the colossal figures who rose across the Indian map were a sign of a rainbow nation, a democracy speaking many languages

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Till the BJP came in to restore high centralism, Indian politics had taken on a distinctly fragmented look. They were all obeying a certain centripetal logic running through the polity: weak centre, powerful peripheries. Take a roving camera's view of the entire cast of characters who filled the canvas. The internal fragmentation of the Congress was one part of the story. Splinters broke off as if from a cooling sun, forming independent planets.