When it first took shape in the imperial era, it was christened in English undertones, The Lawns, they called it, a space by the British, of the British, for the British. Natives were not allowed on the green. Then Gandhi came to lead the Champaran agitation and The Lawns became a native stampede the Empire couldn't hold off. The protagonists of the 1942 Quit India movement issued their calls from these quarters; The Lawns became wracked by recurrent footfall of independence congregations, it was the place you naturally headed to if you were protesting or demanding. But the time Independence came, most had begun to call it after Gandhi.

It was here too that a frail JP came to raise the banner of 'total revolution' against the Indira Gandhi's authoritarianism, the beginnings of what many call India's second struggle for Independence in the mid-1970s. It was here that the Mandal dispensations of the 1990s came to be birthed and rebirthed. Today's was the latest one in an uninterrupted chain since 1990.

And here it was that Narendra Modi came in the October of 2013 to open a front he would famously win the following year. He spoke through a shower of crude bombs that killed and injured several but also seeded the pro-Modi sentiment in deeper in Bihar. It was here that Modi's party chief Amit Shah came this past July to launch his 'parivartan' raths. He spoke through a shower of monsoon rain, and his campaign turned a damp squib.

This afternoon's was a setting not arrived upon the Gandhi Maidan ever before. Two looming fibre arches erected on hydraulic stilts, and transpiring beneath them, the enactments of one government and the dreams of a future one. The architects of today's stage don't intend a dismantling, they are proposing to build on. After the props of the Nitish-Lalu stage have been taken down overnight or tomorrow, there will still remain on Gandhi Maidan the effort at a new foundation - a coalition that can begin to gather from here and last the course to become a credible battlement for 2019. Gandhi Maidan may just have struck a tryst with the future today, that chapter may have to be longer than 25 years.