As India's big parties flounder, minnows scent an election chance

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The popular expectation for India's coming general election is that it will be a showdown between the scion of the grand old Congress party's Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and a firebrand leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

But with both big national parties deeply troubled and languishing in opinion polls, a group of increasingly powerful regional parties might emerge from the media frenzy around Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi as the dark-horse winners.