INDIA: Suresh Wartha, a poor farmer in western India, listlessly picks weeds in his dusty field in the scorching sun as new cars whizz past.
A few yards away, his children run around naked outside his thatched hut, which has no electricity or running water and is barely 70 km north of India's glittering financial capital, Bombay.
"The BJP ruled this country for five years and they say India has made great progress and is becoming a great power in the world," said an angry Wartha (22), whose family barely has enough to eat. "But why, why, why didn't they do something . . . anything for poor farmers like us?"
That anger, echoed around the country on millions of farms where the majority of Indians live, on Thursday cost Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee what seemed a sure victory in national elections.
In the countryside, there is deep resentment among many Indians, who say economic reforms and a booming economy have benefited the urban middle class but left them struggling to feed their families, much less dream of cars and computers.
"The BJP has only made the rich even richer and increased the gap between the poor and rich, but Congress has always been with the poor," said Ganpat Patil, a farmer in Govade village, 110 km north of Bombay.
Northern India may have enjoyed a good monsoon last year but farming - which supports around 700 million of the country's one billion people and comprises 25 per cent of the country's gross domestic product - remains a risky and often unrewarding business.
Stories of wealth, an abundance of consumer goods and foreign holidays for millions in the cities only add insult to injury.
"We have no water, no electricity but I have heard Bombay is a huge city with big cars and tall, shiny new buildings," said Wartha, who cannot read or write.
He has never been to Bombay because he cannot afford the bus fare, less than a dollar, and barely scrapes together 1,000 rupees (€19) a month working as a labourer on construction sites in nearby villages.
Still, Wartha is slightly better off than some other Indian farmers. He owns a tiny piece of land where he grows enough rice to feed his wife, children and parents at least one meal.
But he remains heavily dependent on monsoon rains for the success or failure of his crops.
Y.S.R. Reddy, who will take over today as the new chief minister of Andhra Pradesh state, a burgeoning information technology hub, sums it up when he speaks of a huge rural backlash in the state earlier this week.
"It's the people's wrath being expressed. It's a silent revolution," he said.
Mr Reddy defeated the state's tech-savvy Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, a BJP ally, on Tuesday after he failed to focus on the rural poor in the farming state hit by a severe drought.