Of Indian Elections, Onions and Salt Instead of consulting psephologists, pollsters and political analysts for forecasts on the Indian election next spring, you could just look at the common person's plate. It all comes down to onions and salt. Shifts in onion prices, especially near election time, are enough to turn any incumbent party anti-allium. Last December, onions cost about 20 rupees a kilo; by October, you couldn't buy any in Delhi for less than 100 rupees. The soaring prices inspired hundreds of editorials, with news bureaus clocking the fate of the bulb with as much care as if it were an ailing politician - more, because onions are indispensable, while politicians can be easily replaced. The grim ghost of the Great Onion Crisis of 2010 is stalking the Congress Party-led ruling coalition: That year, after onion prices more than doubled in a week, the government had to ban exports and start importing from Pakistan in order to avert street protests and mass unrest. When the cost of onions goes up, governments can come down. And now the politicians are worried again. One impassioned member of the lower house of Parliament said in August that the rise in onion prices and the drop in the rupee reminded him of Humpty Dumpty - and asked what the government intended to do before its own great fall? Deprived of the fried onions that accompany daal, the braised and chopped onions that form the base of many vegetable and meat dishes, the raw onions without which North Indian kebabs would lose their self-respect, few Indians care to remember that the ancient Hindu texts had unkind things to say about onion and garlic eaters. The Puranas cautioned that eating onions made one sinful, which would require atonement. They declared onions a food best abjured, like mushrooms, pigs that eat waste matter, grains that grow in places of filth, and milk taken from a cow less than 10 days after calving. Though some strict vegetarians and members of the Jain community won't touch onion or garlic, the rest of India overcompensates. According to the Onion and Potato Baseline Report, India produced a healthy 16.10 million tons of onions in 2011-2012. That should have been enough to meet the Directorate of Onion and Garlic Research's tentative estimate for demand, 15.71 million tons. But then villainous forces intervened: bad crops, market forces, over-export, hoarders. By the first week of November, there were tiny hints of hope: The kharif onion crop was just in, prices fell slightly, the government got a bit of breathing space. And then, just as the onion angst subsided, there was an unexpected run on salt. Prices shot to 100-150 rupees per kilo in the states of Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal, up from the usual 16-20 rupees per kilo. Panic buying ensued. In the city of Darjeeling, in West Bengal, 13 traders were detained by the police for selling salt at exorbitant rates. The authorities in the neighboring state of Bihar detained three people for spreading rumors about a salt shortage; the food and civil supply minister promised that any more scaremongers would be interrogated if necessary. The Bihar police are not known for the gentleness of their methods. Salt isn't only indispensable, especially to the poor, for whom it is often the only affordable condiment; it also carries emotional weight, given the part that it played in India's freedom movement. Gandhi's march to Dandi in protest of the heavy British salt tax is well-remembered. Less well commemorated is the Great Hedge of India, the massive customs barrier built down the country's central spine, which, according to the travel writer Roy Moxham, made it much harder to obtain salt in the late 1870s and so indirectly contributed to Mahatma Gandhi's march. Along with the many freedoms that the architects of independence intended to grant their fellow Indians was freedom from a duty on salt. The minutes of an early session of the Constituent Assembly, on Aug. 20, 1947, reveal a moving proposal to insert a line into the new Constitution prohibiting any tax on the commodity. Two years later, in Aug. 1949, some legislators suggested that this was impractical. India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was asked for his opinion. "There is hardly anyone in this House who does not feel rather strongly on this question of salt," he said. Quite apart from the economic implications involved in this matter, salt, at one time in our national history, in the history of our struggle for freedom, became the word of power which moved large masses of human beings and brought about a strange revolution in the country in the course of a few months. Having placed this on the record, he agreed it would indeed be impractical to exempt salt from taxation, and the matter ended there. The latest spike in prices was caused by rumor, not iniquitous taxation: Gossip, apparently baseless, had it that recent differences of opinion between Nitish Kumar, Bihar's chief minister, and Narendra Modi, Gujarat's chief minister and the Bharatiya Janata Party's contender for prime minister, would result in a salt war, since Bihar imports much of the stuff from Gujarat. Mr. Kumar and the B.J.P. traded seasoned salvos over the weekend, but for now the skirmish has ended without bloodshed. Nilanjana S. Roy is an essayist, critic and the author of the novel "The Wildings."