IN THAT leafy part of central Delhi where the politicians live, there was a right old to-do last week. Outside the Tuglak Road police station, reporters from India’s 16 television news channels maintained their spots for doing “lives”, the boredom broken every few hours when a policeman would appear to feed them the latest about the extraordinary Mahajan scandal.

About eight weeks ago Pramod Mahajan, a leading member of the right-wing BJP party and a possible future prime minister, was shot by his brother and died in hospital. That was sensational enough. But now there was more. His son and possible political heir, Rahul Mahajan — a lanky playboy with a face like a slapped bottom — had decided to mark the post-funeral period with his dad’s private secretary, a few other friends and (it seems) 15,000 rupees (£177) of cocaine. Rahul became ill and collapsed, but Vivek Moitra, the male secretary, went one better and died.

The news, which came out gradually in gorgeous 24-hour-news, bite-size chunks, had dominated Indian newspapers and TV for six days by the time I left. The hospital’s initial attempts to cover up the drugs story quickly fell apart under media scrutiny, as did the claim by the BJP that Mahajan was the victim of a poisoning conspiracy.

There are many conclusions to be drawn from the Mahajan case, but one is that the days of powerful politicians being able to gull a naive state-run Indian media are gone for ever.

The week before, on the Azad Maidan in Bombay, where cricket matches happen around each other, boundaries intertwining and players mingling with bystanders, there was a large demonstration. Three thousand students and their parents had come, at the behest of Youth for Equality, to protest on the “reservations” issue, which was — pre-Mahajan — the running lead story. Take a deep breath here and let’s plunge in. At the moment 22.5 per cent of all state-financed professional college places are reserved for Dalits, or the Untouchables, who have traditionally suffered enormous disadvantage. But the Government wants to extend the principle by allocating another 27 per cent of places to what are known as OBCs — Other Backward Classes — who are somewhere between Untouchables and the elite Brahmins.

This has enraged many existing and prospective students, who fear that the places they have gained (or that their siblings might want to occupy) will not be available on merit, but on production of caste credentials. They argue that many in the OBCs are, in fact, perfectly well-off and constitute what they call “the creamy layer”. One placard on Azad Maidan depicted sunglasses-wearing yuppies drinking beer and saying, “No need to work, we will definitely get seats due to quota”. Would you, they ask, prefer to be treated by a doctor who has qualified on merit or because of quotas? Many of the students I spoke to were genuinely enraged by what they saw as “vote bank politics”, an attempt by the Government to bolster its support among the majority communities at the expense of meritocracy.

Reporting on the demo, clad in a deep-blue sari, was Deepthy Menon, a senior correspondent for the Times Now satellite channel. She told me why the students wouldn’t win. “This is a class issue,” she said, “not a mass issue. The masses don’t care. They don’t make enough to allow their children to go to medical school.” As if to prove her point, one of the tiny homeless kids who roam the Maidan had appropriated a student placard and hung it round his neck — upside down. The electoral arithmetic is hard to fault. There may be many more votes to be won from other classes by extending quotas than from the middle classes by maintaining them. If so, then — independent of the arguments — it would be a brave Indian government that ignored the equations.

Gurcharan Das, the free-market enthusiast who wrote India Unbound, explained it like this when we met in his Delhi residence: “When the middle class becomes half the population then they, too, will be a vote bank.” When that happens, economic reform will truly, in his view, become unstoppable. The almost desperate need to propitiate poorer Indians, at least rhetorically, arose out of the fragmentation of the Congress Party in the Seventies and Eighties. Regional populist parties appeared to fill the vacuum. Often led by film stars or — almost as bad — criminals, they promised redress to the masses against their enemies, whether elitist governments or uppity Muslims. So bad did things become that The Times of India, in an editorial in 1997 on the 50th anniversary of independence, lamented: “We are ostensibly on the verge of a major breakthrough; yet the truth is that a deprived India is eating voraciously into the margins of the prosperous India.”

The worst has not happened, but the tension between economic progress and political populism is the central feature of Indian politics, arising from the obvious fact of continuing widespread poverty.

To Sachin Pilot, the youngest MP in the Indian Parliament when he was elected two years ago, this struggle against poverty is “one of the greatest battles of our times”. He said: “Tens of millions of people live on less than a dollar a day. The division in society between the urban, the rural, and the rich and the poor, is getting wider and wider. The task is to find a balance.”

Pilot, the son of a Congress minister, married to a Muslim and the holder of an MBA from the US, represents perfectly the reality of Indian politics. He may agree with Gurcharan Das that 1 per cent of the poor having stepped above the poverty line every year since 1980 is something to be celebrated. But he also has to emphasise the need for specific policies to lift up the masses.

There is, therefore, a political game being played in India. In power nationally or at state level, all parties are desperate to attract investment, create industries, welcome the Yanks and anyone else in, but then — in opposition — they seek votes by moaning about inequality and globalisation. Even the Communists are adept at this approach. They run the state of West Bengal. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, its Chief Minister, is about to visit the US to seduce investors but, at the same time, he is under fire for permitting the Tata Group to build car plants on large tracts of land.

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