This is vast, churning, aspirational India. Farmers I met in the state of Andhra Pradesh were spending every last rupee they earned, or incurring terrible debts, to send their children to private schools advertised on billboards on the highway in the hopes that they would somehow end up with an office job — anything, really, other than farming. Young men were staking their hopes on software courses at fly-by-night colleges, hoping for something better than work at a call center. They all seemed poised to take a leap, but had no idea where they were leaping to.

Many of these people wound up at the rallies of Narendra Modi, the candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The gatherings began like small-town carnivals, as streams of young men in jeans and T-shirts emerged from alleyways and jogged down the road together. Mr. Modi opens his speeches with words of soft affection for his followers, and there were times that his punishing schedule could be seen in his drained face and rumpled clothes, but he gathered strength from the sea of faces tilted up at him, like a battery recharging, and the rallies would finish as a livid, roaring attack on the status quo.