It was the waiting that finally got to Ajit Shukla — the interminable queues at the government offices that still control almost every aspect of life in India.

A graduate of Bombay’s prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, he could have walked into a job at a multinational company and ignored these frustrations for the rest of his life. Most of his peers did.

Instead, he and seven like-minded friends have set up a political party, which they hope will mobilise the apathetic middle classes to clean up Indian politics.

“We all realised about the same time that you can’t change anything in India without getting involved in politics,” Mr Shukla, a 28-year-old mechanics graduate, said.

“In the last 10 to 20 years Indian politics has been completely corrupted — we have to reform the system at the highest level.”

It is, he admitted, early days for the Bharat Punarnirman Dal (India Reconstruction Party), which was founded in a friend’s apartment in Delhi in December.

The party is making its debut by competing in four constituencies in local elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, which begin on Saturday. It is running its campaign from a tiny office with no furniture and no door. And it has a budget of only 140,000 rupees (£1,600).

Its lowly premises, however, belie the enormous talent and enthusiasm of its founding members, who include five IIT graduates, an MBA, a doctor and a lawyer — most of them under 30.

In the three months since its formation, it has attracted 1,500 paying members, and 25,000 nonpaying online members through its website, www. bharatpunarnirman.org. “By the end of this year we’ll have a full-time staff of 50, and within ten years we’ll establish ourselves as a force to be reckoned with,” Mr Shukla said.

Political analysts dismissed that as wishful thinking and played down the party’s chances in the state elections, principally because of the huge cost of campaigning. “I wish them luck,” said Prem Shankar Jha, a political analyst and former editor of the Hindustan Times.

“Perhaps they can spark something in urban areas, but the dice are loaded against small parties and I think they’ll

find that out the hard way.” The party’s formation, he said, reflected the growing disillusion with mainstream political parties among India’s middle class youth. “The decision to express this disillusion through founding a party is something new — and courageous.”

When India won independence from Britain in 1947, it had half a dozen parties, whose leaders were mostly lawyers, such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. Today it has a dizzying array of parties, most of which are dominated by political dynasties such as the Gandhis, by caste leaders or, increasingly, by criminal bosses.

After the Supreme Court ordered all politicians to declare criminal records in 2003, it emerged that at least 100 of India’s 545 MPs had criminal backgrounds. As a result most young Indian graduates shy away from politics, either leaving the country or forging careers in business in India. Those who are politically minded tend to go into nongovernmental organisations, of which there are more than 1.2 million in India. The BPD founders experienced these frustrations first-hand when they started to become interested in politics as students. “It’s impossible to get involved in the big parties unless you have money or family connections,” said Omendra Pratap Singh, 27, a graduate of an IIT in the city of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh.

After graduating in 2006 he was hired by Tata Consultancy Services with a starting package of nearly half a million rupees. After only four months he resigned to work for the BPD, and is now standing for one of Kanpur’s six constituencies. He knows the party has chosen a tough place to make its debut.

Uttar Pradesh, with a population of 166 million, is dominated by two parties that draw their support from the lowest levels of India’s caste system. Politics here is notoriously corrupt, with many parties using armed thugs to mobilise huge blocks of lower-caste voters.

The party’s founders insist that they are taking the first small steps of a movement that could change the face of Indian politics. “We want to show people that they can take part in politics,” Mr Shukla said. “We’re going to bring about a revolution that India has been waiting for for 50 years.”

High crime

— Babloo Srivastava is campaigning for the Uttar Pradesh elections from prison, where he has spent ten years. He faces 32 charges, including murder

— More than 200 of the 403 members of the Uttar Pradesh assembly face criminal charges, at least 93 for murder or kidnapping

— A 2004 study found that nearly a quarter of the 545 Indian MPs had faced criminal charges

— Shibu Soren, the former Coal Minister, was found guilty last year of conspiracy in the abduction and murder of an aide 12 years ago

Source: Times research

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