India, June 25 -- Naveen Patnaik, Jyoti Basu and Nitish Kumar are, in that order, the three longest-serving chief ministers of a major state in India. These leaders came neither from the Congress nor the BJP or its ideological predecessor. The roots of their political rise are found in the political churn in India of the 1960s and 70s when Congress's hegemonic dominance in Indian politics started giving way, but a new national hegemon was nowhere in sight.

Now that India has a new national political hegemon in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Indian politics seems to be going back in time. The BJP's initial successes came against the Congress. Now it is subsuming regional parties which first grew against the Congress. Today, there is ve...