INDIA’S general election, the world’s biggest democratic exercise, kicks off on April 7th. Voting will take place, across 35 states and territories, until May 12th. The country has a Westminster-style system: it is divided into 543 roughly equal constituencies (typically with some 1.5m voters), each sending a single MP to parliament. The whole electorate is a whopping 815m people, the populations of America and the EU combined. A decade of rising incomes, on the back of a growth spurt, has improved many lives. Yet opinion polls show that voters everywhere are grumpy. One released this week by the Pew Research Centre found 70% dissatisfied with India’s prospects and more than eight out of ten bitterly gloomy about economic matters. “Everything is a problem for the Indian voter,” concludes Bruce Stokes of Pew.

Politics is messy: hefty regional parties claim roughly half the total vote and run many state governments. At the national level two broad groupings exist, to which others lend support. One is led by secular Congress, which has a national presence and has ruled for a decade (and 54 of the past 67 years). The other is fronted by the right-leaning, Hindu-dominated Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This, the main opposition, draws most of its strength from the mostly Hindi-speaking north and west.

The village of Kamalpur, some 70km from central Delhi, shows the pre-election mood as well as any. It boasts a tarmac road, a row of tiny barber shops and fields of young green wheat. This used to be a poor, rural spot, but no longer. Half-built concrete towers line an improved highway as the city marches into western Uttar Pradesh (UP). Many locals are giving up farming to sell milk or flowers to the city, or hire out generators. Several toil in textile factories in Noida, the nearest big town.

These workers, in turn, are changing the lives of those left behind. Before 2004, says a teacher, few families sent children to school, least of all daughters. “Now you cannot earn from farming, so everyone wants to get educated and find jobs in factories near Delhi,” he says. The greatest concern is jobs, say the men beside him.

The mood of Kamalpur’s residents is revealing. As they are mostly Muslims, Congress hopes for their votes. Yet the party’s main message interests nobody. No one speaks in favour of public welfare, subsidised rice and wheat or efforts to provide make-work jobs, policies supposed to give Congress the support of the rural poor. “A programme is good if it reaches here, but it doesn’t come,” says one man, sparking a lively chat about crooked politicians. A good road to the city helps more.

By contrast, the BJP is fired up. Middle-caste Hindus whose lives are fast improving dominate nearby villages. Those who have grumbled eternally about bad rains can now moan instead about traffic jams into Delhi. Signs of their new wealth are abundant. Walk down narrow alleys and men crowd around to film you using their tablets and phones. “It is very fine here,” says one. “We are connected.”

These voters back the BJP and predict rapid economic gains after the election. They are impatient for a better life, having tasted the optimism that faster expansion brought in the 2000s. Frustrated since then by slower growth (stuck at 5%) and high prices, they want Congress crushed.

A watershed in three parts

This election is likely to be seminal. A campaign strategist for a big party talks of “citizen consumers” who are intolerant of substandard politicians and readier than ever to dump them. These more demanding voters are emerging thanks to three intertwined trends: a youth bulge, urbanisation and rising incomes. In time, they should help to improve the political system.

The rise of the young is dramatic. Around half of India’s 1.2 billion people are under 26, with no memories from before the first liberalising reforms of 1991 but aware that development still lags. These “born frees” are the vanguard of a huge number who will come of age in the next two decades. Over 100m voters have been added to the electorate since 2009. Turnout is usually about 60%, but could be higher—recent state elections show people unusually eager to vote.

Shrewder politicians are taking advantage. Swapan Dasgupta, a political analyst close to Narendra Modi, the BJP prime-ministerial candidate, describes a campaign strategy focused on the young. He thinks 40% of voters are under 35, and care most about jobs. “They ask what their future is likely to be, that is more important than their local identity,” he says.

Women are being wooed, too. Older politicians hardly bothered, since women voted less than men, or (notably in villages) did as husbands or fathers ordered. That is changing. Studies of national and state elections show women voting more: the gap between them and men has shrunk with every decade. Nationally women’s representation is low, with just under 11% of MPs in the last parliament, but it is rising. Parties now cram campaign material with images of women voters.

The second broad trend is the rise of urban India (see chart 1). Official statistics, somewhat misleadingly, suggest that nearly two-thirds of Indians still live in villages. Boundaries drawn in 2008 also count about two-thirds of constituencies as rural. These have been frozen until 2031. But facts on the ground are changing fast: in two decades they will be utterly different.

Don’t tell them how to vote Urban India generates nearly two-thirds of national income. Some 50 cities have 1m residents or more; greater Delhi contains more people than the Netherlands. Connecting them, across thousands of kilometres, are incipient industrial corridors, thickening ribbons of roadside development. Increasingly, as in Kamalpur, the city matters beyond its limits. Those in villages who take on jobs—as shopkeepers, small businessmen, traders in farm equipment—are not so different from town folk. Some 300m people will move to town in the next 25 years, almost doubling the urban population. Urban votes are destined to outnumber the rural. Out of 543 constituencies, over 150 are already “totally or substantially urban”, reckons a strategist for a large party. That tally will rise fast. Town-dwellers are said not to vote. In places this is true. A Hyderabadi politician recalls the failure in 2009 of an urban anti-corruption party, People’s Power, which tried appealing to IT workers and the like but found that only 150,000 had registered to vote in the city. However, data from the Election Commission analysed by a think-tank, CSDS, show that urban turnout historically differs little from rural. As important, urban types are influencing their country cousins. Villagers studying in town, a family relying on remittances from a son there, growing numbers who watch cable television and get phone calls from town, all help shape the opinions of rural friends and relatives. Consumer-goods firms grasp this, as they see rural folk adopting urban shopping habits. The English-language Times of India reports a flourishing circulation in villages. Ideas spread, too. Small towns and villages in 2011 soon mimicked the anti-corruption protests that first erupted in Delhi.

The third big trend involves incomes. The less-poor are becoming more politically demanding, and centuries-old feudal habits are waning. Illiterate peasants often deferred to powerful local landowners, royals or famous dynasts from the ruling party. Now changes in jobs, incomes and literacy rates (74% generally, higher among the young) are helping to end that.

India may have been rotten at creating formal employment, but millions have left the fields, for at least part of the year, to work in construction, drive lorries, or do jobs in roadside cafés or beauty parlours across 646,000 towns and villages. That changes how they see themselves. Owning a phone, says one observer, brings a strong sense of status, even dignity.

Among the 200 households in Kamalpur, concrete walls are replacing mud. Nearly half the homes contain a television—cricket, soap operas and news are popular—and the teacher says 70% of families have a small motorbike. Roughly half the youngsters know how to go online using smartphones. Everyone has a mobile phone: “They’re for girlfriends,” says a teenage boy, grinning. It all represents dramatic change from five years ago.

Politicians know they can profit from this. Mr Modi’s talk about jobs especially appeals to what he calls the “neo-middle class”. Rahul Gandhi, the leader of Congress, refers to a “new class”, claiming that it has “emerged now under our ten-year rule”. Gurcharan Das, a former boss of Procter & Gamble, now a writer, thinks this class already constitutes a third of the population and will rise to half in a decade.

A rich Indian investor in Bangalore predicts that this group will hold more electoral sway than the very poor, whose numbers are falling. The government claims, plausibly, that 140m have escaped the worst poverty in the past ten years. More will follow, if the economy holds up. Every new English-language or computer-studies school is a sign of aspiration.

“One God, that is GDP”

The coming election is a chance to see these three broad trends reshape politics. Some argue that they decided the last one, in 2009, when urban voters bet that the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, an economist, would keep growth up and inflation down and create jobs. (They were wrong.) Frustrated, they have since protested, first against corruption, then in demonstrations over women’s safety and later by backing the new Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party in Delhi. Now they have turned to Mr Modi.

Such voters care less about caste or religion, and more about economic prospects. This matters for how politics works. Older voters, especially in poorer areas, are more likely to be treated as part of an identity group, and then bought off. A group leader contacts a politician and offers to sell a “vote bank” for money and goodies-in-kind, such as saris, booze or cricket sets.

So much illicit money is usually diverted to election spending that the flow of cash almost dries up in some lines of trade, such as the construction industry. Owners of building firms need strong political connections, so they provide much of the money that is dished out before polling. A journalist in Hyderabad says that a typical candidate might spend “40m-50m rupees [$700,000-800,000] per constituency to fund and feed the voters”.

In old-style politics voters also seek pay-offs for their group, such as welfare, preferential status for a sub-caste or government jobs. Candidates may play up the insecurities (often genuine) of a particular minority, such as Muslims or dalits, the Hindu group formerly known as “untouchables”. Big regional parties based on caste or religion preach the message that having “one of us” in office matters more than what a government actually does.

Yet that approach looks dated, at least among younger, more urban and wealthier voters. They are increasingly likely to consider themselves individuals, not members of groups. Bribing voters may become less useful if group leaders struggle to deliver promised vote banks, as is more and more the case. Canny voters know that they can often bag gifts from rival candidates, then cast their ballots as they would have done regardless.

Voters seem to be judging politicians more by their performance. In the past, delivering economic growth seemed to have little link to getting re-elected. That is changing (see chart 2). In state governments, parties presiding over decent economic growth have been re-elected, as in Gujarat, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha; those who fail to deliver have been booted out, as in UP and Rajasthan.

Surveys point the same way. People no longer like to admit to caring about caste and religion. A team from the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Endowment and India’s Lok Foundation, which is interviewing 68,500 voters before and after the election, says 57% of respondents cite economic matters (growth, inflation, personal income) as most important. Just 3% mention caste or identity. The researchers admit that this overstates things. Most people also care strongly about candidates’ caste and religion. Still, the trend is towards pragmatism, says Rajiv Lall of the Lok Foundation; politicians need to focus more on delivering development. Not everyone welcomes that. A political commentator in his club in Kolkata—West Bengal is India’s strongest bastion for lefties—harrumphs that “the post liberalisation generation, the 22-year-old, thinks there is only one God, that is GDP.”

The cult of the leader

Another change is in how campaigns are run. Of old, especially among villagers, a politician was supposed mainly to show his face at rallies. This is still true: Mr Modi, for example, plans nearly 200 by the end of voting in mid-May. But younger, better-off and more urban voters are increasingly reached through the media; and this, over time, could encourage more national voting trends.

Television matters most. Those rallies are partly designed to get coverage on evening news broadcasts, regional and national. Out of 234m households, 153m now have a set, up from 123m at the last election. Campaign adverts frequently interrupt viewing; the BJP’s are especially slick. Mr Modi now hopes television can help to spread the idea of an unstoppable wave of support for him. Creating that expectation matters: voters like to back winners in the hope of getting rewarded.

New technology is increasingly important. The better organised parties, including Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP, use mass text messages to raise lots of small donations—handy if you refuse funds from crooked businessmen. Phones also help recruit volunteers. Social media will probably have little influence. Facebook’s 93m Indian users may sound like a lot, but they are only a ninth of the electorate. Still, rapid internet growth, like the spread of phones a decade ago, points to bigger changes later.

The media also help to explain how a personality cult is rising around Mr Modi, encouraged by his gruff, rather macho personality and a desire among some for a strong leader. But his campaign, encouragingly, is mostly about his development record as chief minister in Gujarat. Few appear explicitly drawn or repelled by his much darker record from 2002, when rioting in Gujarat saw more than 1,000 killed, most of them Muslims.

People also warm to Mr Modi’s carefully promoted story as a man who, by his own efforts, rose from humble beginnings as a tea-seller. That is a contrast to Rahul Gandhi of Congress, the pampered dynast. So far Mr Gandhi, though only 43, looks ill- at-ease with the hopes of young voters. His emphasis on offering a new “regime of rights” assumes that voters would trust government to guarantee them. That trust has faded. “He is 20 years behind the rest of India, he misses the trend, that young people want good jobs, they don’t want to dig holes in the ground or get subsidies,” says a political observer in Bangalore.

Others in his party understand the changes better. Nandan Nilekani, a 58-year-old billionaire who co-founded Infosys, a successful firm, is contesting his first seat in Bangalore. His brief stump speech is businesslike, calling for transparent rules in government, saying the private sector must flourish to create millions of jobs.

An adviser speaks fluently about changing politics: “An earlier generation was content to be ruled and lorded over. Young Indians now expect more. Ambitions have grown non-linearly, but our system, our structure has not kept up. People are no longer content.” The candidate himself talks of “the new, aspirational young voter, the professional, educated, who doesn’t look to the state for benefits”.

Mr Nilekani’s campaign is efficient, using 1,000 volunteers, sending a personalised letter to each voter, studying electoral data from 2009 to guide canvassers to the promising corners of his constituency. He calls himself a “guinea pig”, experimenting with a cleaner, sharper style of campaign. Others could hardly replicate what a billionaire celebrity does, but his techniques can be adopted, if not his biography. His chances of beating his old-style opponent, a five-term incumbent from the BJP, are probably even.

Win or lose, at least he grasps what many constituents in Bangalore, and those young, increasingly urban and better-off residents of Kamalpur are demanding. They see society changing fast, and expect politics to respond. They want to hold leaders to account and judge how they perform in office. That will almost certainly mean a new party in power, very probably the BJP, come May. Beyond that, politicians need to learn that citizen consumers will prove pushier, more troublesome and more impatient than the deferential electorates of old. For India’s democracy, that can only be a good thing.