But we don’t have to look as far as Bihar to see the ascendancy of negative forces in politics. Today all political parties claim as their prime agenda, a corruption-free government, yet have in their fold businessmen who have looted the system to the hilt and built personal empires from the sweat and tears of the common man. People in large swathes of this country continue to languish in poverty.

Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) is known to have subverted the system to build his kingdom as a sugar baron. For decades money has been invested in irrigation projects in Maharashtra amounting to thousands of crores of rupees without the poor farmers benefiting from those. Naturally, we hear of farmers’ suicides from these depressed regions of Maharashtra but beyond the newspaper reports no salutary action is taken.

Prior to coming to power at the Centre, the BJP promised clean and responsive governance to the voters. And people actually believed Modi and voted overwhelmingly for the BJP. But Modi the vote-winner is now talking differently after becoming Modi the Prime Minister. His sharing a platform with Pawar recently just shows us that mainstream politics will continually get itself into a tight corner where the actors have to make compromises at great cost to the electorate.