POLITICS in India was once the most open of systems. Between electoral politics and civil society experiments, India was justly celebrated as a democracy. Today, that world of the party and the electoral process reflects a closure of ideas. Initially though, political pandits misled us by contending that our youth was consumerist and apolitical. The decline of the political was once a major issue, but today it is the party system that needs a hearing aid as it lacks responsiveness to the politics played outside it. This emerging politics needs a political obstetrics to deliver the new fully. The appearance of the new is almost tacit, even stillborn. The new lurks in the corner waiting for the old to play itself out. But one thing is clear: the litany of the decline of the political is no longer true. Politics need not always express itself as ideology, plan, and governance. It seeks new metaphors, new scripts, new utopias and heroes. Politics in India is now about waiting for the new, at a moment when old formulas and politicians are reluctant to abandon the stage. It is just that India has changed but our politicians are virtually the same. The irony is that our politicians do not recognize what is happening. When the new is not yet born and the old holds on stubbornly, an incarnation of the old pretending to be new takes centre stage. This politics of the interim masquerading as the new is noisy, hysterical, a pseudo-prophetic mix of categories, a cafeteria of desires, a costume ball of hope. One sees it woven around Rahul, Nitish and Modi. They are tossed up like three trial balloons, three thought experiments the nation could vote on. It is a tentative circus of styles, options, and alternatives. First, Narendra Modi rewrites the Hindutva past as the new bandh-gala technocrat, the swadeshi pracharak who thinks global. His style is most accommodating to corporate dons, his words are minted anew, and he speaks with all the enthusiasm of a convert. Then there is Nitish Kumar playing out the last wisps of a JP dream, talking of inclusivity, of a politics of coalition where one carries the other groups along. Finally, there is Rahul – thoughtful, invertebrate in ideas, seeking a distance from a stereotypically corrupt Congress. All three are old arguments in new bottles, seeking brand value where there is none. The hysteria over the three shows not an intensity of the political but its decline. They are potted ideas in potted costumes sold by statesmen of the mediocre.