NEW DELHI: Having seen their one-room shack in an Indian slum on the edge of the river Yamuna razed by bulldozers in April, Salim and Amina Bano have little to cheer about.

But news that Jagmohan (one name) - the union minister for tourism and culture in the outgoing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government - had lost his constituency in which the Yamuna river bank falls has brought the couple more happiness than they have known in a long time.

"On voting day in Delhi (May 10) we travelled 40 kilometres from the resettlement colony of Bavana, where we now live, just to cast our votes against Jagmohan in the special voting booths set up for us by the Election Commission," they told IPS.

Nearly 8,000 voters turned up at the booths set up amid a sea of rubble that till a week before the four-phased elections began on April 20 was the vast Yamuna Pushta slums - home to more than 150,000 impoverished settlers mostly from eastern Bihar and West Bengal states.

"We are happy that Jagmohan and his anti-poor party are both now out of power," said Salim and Amina, satisfaction showing on their tired faces.

The former residents of Yamuna Pushta were able to vote following the intervention of the Delhi High Court and the Election Commission, which could not prevent the hasty demolition of their homes but saw to it that they were not disenfranchized as well in the process.

Jagmohan, a career-bureaucrat-turned politician with a reputation for razing down slums, was well on his way to turning the Yamuna waterfront into a vast tourist-cum-culture complex on the lines of the Thames' banks in London.

But political developments - this week's electoral debacle of the BJP - overtook his grand plans.

Like Jagmohan, several members of the outgoing cabinet have come to grief mainly because they lost sight of the India's chronically poor millions and their simple needs. Instead, they pursued grandiose but unworkable plans that ranged from rewriting history textbooks to finding billions of dollars needed to link together the subcontinent's major rivers.

Take Murli Manohar Joshi, union minister for human resources development, who lost his constituency in the holy city of Allahabad, which is famous for its 'Kumbh Melas' that gather tens of millions of people for festivals considered auspicious in the Hindu calendar.

During his five years in what might have been an obscure ministry, Joshi set about literally rewriting history. That is to say he ordered changes in India's history textbooks that suited the BJP's jingoistic world view of Hinduism being at the centre of world civilization and knowledge. He also fired respectable historians who disagreed this revisionism.

The almost Goebbelsian enterprise of Joshi, a former professor of physics at the University of Allahabad, ranged from celebrating the discovery of zero by ancient Indian mathematicians to promoting the rather dubious theory that the Aryan race went from India to Europe rather than the other way around.

Joshi liberally funded any idea that glorified Vedic Aryan or Hindu civilization, such as using satellite imagery to rediscover the mythical Saraswati river on the banks of which it was supposed to have grown. Meanwhile, extant rivers were drying up or being converted into vast sewers for lack of funds and management.

His last endeavour, now stalled by the BJP's electoral debacle, was a plan under which his ministry would have seized control of the autonomous Indian Institutes of Management (IIM), famed for providing the brains for several global corporations, by interfering with their fee structure.

Joshi's bureaucracy threatened and taunted senior faculty members and accused them of financial irregularities so that several of the institutes toed his line and agreed to massive fee cuts that put them at the mercy of government funding. Those that held out are now celebrating his ouster.

Joshi's arguments that he was ordering a two-thirds reduction in the fees collected by the institutes in order to encourage poor students to study management evidently did not impress his voters in Allahabad.

This is in spite of the many endowments and grants Joshi made to the cause of higher education in a city where he himself had once taught.

Yet another BJP stalwart who bit the dust in the elections was Yashwant Sinha, who first held the finance portfolio but was shifted to foreign affairs. This occurred after a massive scam involving the diversion of funds into the stock markets from the government mutual fund - the Unit Trust of India (UTI). This brought some 20 million depositors close to ruination.

Like Jagmohan, Sinha was a member of India's elite civil service before he took to politics. He made the cardinal mistake of forgetting the needs of voters in his constituency - in this case Hazaribagh, which falls in the largely tribal state of Jharkhand in eastern India.

More than half of the 2,000-odd people arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (Pota), enthusiastically championed by Sinha to conform to the United Nations' requirements following the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, happened to be from his constituency and nearby districts.

A team of human rights activists, led by the People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) that toured Jharkahn last year, reported that Pota was being indiscriminately used against ordinary citizens, illiterate tribals, and low-caste people and that women and minors under the age of 18 and aged people were being booked under the law that disallows bail.

The many testimonies collected from among Pota detainees by activists include that of Ropni Kharia, a 17-year-old girl from Gumla district whose only crime seemed to have been that she had passed her school final and was literate enough to speak up against repression.

How Ropni Khari, who was brutalised by the police in custody, voted is not immediately known. But the chances are that she contributed to Yashwant Sinha's ignominious defeat at Hazaribagh. -Dawn/The InterPress News Service.