A strip of road, a bulb of light, a bucketful of water, and thou beside me in the wilderness------- that was all Indians had asked, it seems, in the four states that went to the polls to decide who would rule over them for another five years. ‘Thou’, as you know from Khayyam, is a beautiful woman, at least a woman, in any case, for if you have the imagination to love, then she would be beautiful to you.

And it so happens that three states got their women. One returned to the woman it had loved. The Congress’s Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister of Delhi won a second back-to-back tenure. Madhya Pradesh, it turns out, switched off the power they had supplied unerringly to their former chief minister Digvijay Singh, because they did not get light and roads. They now have a celibate woman, Uma Bharati, called "a Hindu holy woman" by New York Times, to rule over them.

Rajasthan has also elected a woman, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, to power their dreams of development. In the process, they dumped their Congress chief minister, Ashok Gehlot, whose claim to reclaim power was that he handled the draught in the state very well. Vasundhara Raje Scindia is a first time chief minister, but she has had a stint in the Union ministry as a junior external affairs minister.

This is a rather spectacular wave for women in the northern parts of India. And they have ridden to power, with wide margins, on issues that would surprise most who have not upgraded their the idea of India in recent times. Roads, electricity, development. In fact, development has been the reason India’s North Eastern state of Mizoram, once deeply disaffected with Federal India, returned the local party, the Mizo National Front and its strongman Zoramthanga.

Those perennially worried about the inability of India’s cowbelt to hook on to the country’s economic gravy train (though mostly shadow, it’s still got some substance), this shift in public sensibility might offer a slim glimmer of hope. Despite fears, Narendra Modi and his ilk were not milked too much by the BJP to win these elections. They seemed to have sensed the mood right. A riot-medal-winner is not much help in places where there were no lights to light up his much-medalled chest.

There are other indications that the BJP itself might be morphing into a less bellicose party, nationally. As priorities change, and election-winning issues have dropped their celestial apocrypha and become as earthy as burning asphalt, or lack of it, chariots and raths are going out of fashion. As of now, they might still have a slight symbolism, and help attract inquisitive crowds mourning for the old village fun of bioscopes and madaris, but last heard several cinema house owners displaced by multiplexes are looking for cheap places with sufficient crowds.

Don’t count on the disappearance of religion, or its barbaric abuse to swing public sentiments. Communal riots are wolves still waiting at the door. There is still an old guard with cataracts who close their eyes and dream of a pristine Hindu rashtra. Those eyes open once in a while, emitting signs of life. But they belong to a fast depleting stock of geriatrics irrelevant to their own families. They might still distribute the shards of their pet dream, fan divides that will shame the nation, but eventually economics will defeat their illusory histories.

Because those roads, those lights, those buckets, and those women will hopefully lead some kind of rag- tag paradise to their patches of wilderness. Otherwise, they too will perish, like their male counterparts, but there will be more roads, and lights.

It is interesting that others too are noticing it. The New York Times report on the elections in India said clearly about the BJP “But in these campaigns, the party’s leaders studiously avoided Hindutva as an issue.”

The Washington Post’s report noted the development too. “Contrary to some predictions, the BJP played down its philosophy of Hindutva -- literally, Hinduness -- in state contests that turned largely on local issues such as roads and electricity.”

But what warmed the cockles of the heart was one aspect of the elections that only the NYT noted. “It was a historic day for Indian women. All three women, who had been put forth by their parties as candidates for chief minister, won. Sheila Dikshit, the administrator of Delhi, was the only one of four Congress incumbents to win. In Madhya Pradesh, Uma Bharti, a charismatic Hindu holy woman, led her party to power and in Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje, the daughter of a maharajah, did the same.”

Maybe it has to do with the fact that NYT’s India correspondent Amy Waldman, is a woman, and The Washington Post’s is John Lancaster. Even the fact that Hindutva was not the main plank of the elections was the last line in NYT’s report. The Washington Post mentioned it in the eighth para of a 12-para story.

So what is the moral of the story?

We are getting reported in the US as “women are moving up in India” even in the notoriously backward and casteist cowbelt. This might be seen as good omen, the external push to internal determination for aspirants of mud and thatch paradises.