Scholars, policy-makers and politicians debate whether disaffection among India's 140 million Muslims results from poverty and disadvantage rather than religious alienation. A poll by Outlook magazine showed close to 80 per cent thought economic divisions were responsible for religious conflict.

In the most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, a Dalit (former Untouchable) woman, Mayawati, led her party to an election victory last year, becoming Chief Minister for the fourth time; that would have been unthinkable three generations ago. A government report last year estimated that more than 75 per cent of Indians spent less than 20 rupees (62 cents) a day to live. But Mukesh Ambani, one of the world's richest men, is completing a new $1.5 billion house in Mumbai. Until the current generation, two things mitigated India's disparities of wealth: the ideology of caste and the isolation imposed by poor communications. You accepted the role of the caste into which you were born and believed that your next life would be better; you aspired eventually to escape the cycle of rebirth.

But in the past 25 years a communications revolution has transformed India. Once it had virtually no television; now there are more than 50 TV news channels, and a quarter of the population have mobile phones. The lavish Ambani lifestyle is now portrayed on TV and discussed in newspapers whose total circulation has multiplied by six times and approaches 100 million papers a day. Governments based on the old elites realise the dangers. Class disparities allow outsiders such as Mayawati to build new political parties. Ridiculed by the mainstream media, Mayawati and her associates used mobile phones to organise hundreds of local campaign meetings and won 206 seats in a legislature of 402 members. She is the non-violent side of conflict. For two generations, violent upheaval in the countryside has been possible. Today the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, intended to provide 100 days of paid work a year to the rural poor, is a centrepiece of the national coalition Government's strategy to attack poverty and rural disquiet. Its critics decry the act as a temporary solution to win the votes of the poor, not lift them out of crisis.

Yet India's resilient political system opens various paths to the future. Mayawati's capture of legislative power suggests the capacity in a democracy, however flawed, for outsiders to become insiders; ultimately, that changes the system itself. At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities are gun battles in remote forests between marginalised zealots and the Indian state.

India is in the midst of six state elections with results to be announced on December 8. National elections are due in the first half of next year. Nationally, the ruling coalition of the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, and the Congress party president, Sonia Gandhi, will face a formidable challenge from a rival alignment centred on the Bharatiya Janata Party, which stresses Hindu identity to paper over class divisions. Events in Mumbai will almost certainly turn the national poll into a tough-on-terrorism election, which will favour the BJP.

India's communications revolution, which the perpetrators of yesterday's carnage are exploiting, will continue to propel its rulers to interact with the world and seek recognition as a great power. The same process will drive the poor to compare their lives with those of the rich and powerful. In the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks the challenge for the Indian state has not changed: it must find ways to dull the jagged edges of class disparity.

Robin Jeffrey is a professor of politics at the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.