‘The Economist’ and India’s Election
Posted : May 23, 2009 at 4:41 pm [IST]
Many a times the TV coverage gets real boring. It was getting dull with ’status quo’ symptoms. I was not finding any signature of the powerful Prime Minister that he and his trio of the marketing team claimed. However, I found my excitement in a special coverage of the Indian election and its outcome in ‘The Economist’. It appeared to me a tribute to the largest democracy of the poorest people of the world because of its uniqueness and diversity. Here are some for the readers:
INDIA is a land of bright promise. It is also extremely poor. About 27m Indians will be born this year. Unless things improve, almost 2m of them will die before the next general election. Of the children who survive, more than 40% will be physically stunted by malnutrition. Most will enroll in a school, but they cannot count on their teachers showing up. After five years of classes, less than 60% will be able to read a short story and more than 60% will still be stumped by simple arithmetic.
EVER unpredictable, Indian voters delivered their pentennial surprise on May 16th, when over 417m ballots were totted up. Reversing decades of decline, the Congress party had won the country’s month-long election, which ended on May 13th, by a bigger margin than its most enthusiastic cheer-leaders had dared dream of. Congress and its electoral allies won 261 of 543 available seats. With support from a few tiny regional parties and independents, they will have a majority in India’s 15th parliament. On May 20th India’s president, Pratibha Patil, therefore reappointed Manmohan Singh prime minister, making him the first prime minister to achieve this distinction at the end of a five-year term since India’s first, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Government activism helps explain why the creditworthy big emerging economies can recover more quickly. But it cannot create long-term resilience. China’s rebound will only be sustained if the economy shifts further from state-sponsored investment to private consumption. That will require tough structural changes, from forcing state-owned firms to pay fatter dividends to a stronger social safety net. Other countries, notably India, must calibrate their government finances even more carefully (see article). The idea of decoupling lives on, but that does not mean sustained prosperity in the big emerging economies is a foregone conclusion.
The BJP’s traditional boasts are to run the economy more skilfully and defend the nation more stoutly than does Congress, the other big party, which leads the outgoing coalition government. But with an estimated 1.5m jobs lost in exporting industries in the past six months, this is no time to talk of economic reform, of which Indians were wary even in fatter times. And Congress, stronger in poor, rural areas, is a more obvious champion of the jobless poor than is the BJP, with its base in richer urban places. Straining to counter this, the BJP’s manifesto promises India’s poorest families a monthly ration of 35kg (77lbs) of rice at only two rupees (four cents) a kilo; Congress promises three rupees a kilo.
Yet for the BJP to build a coalition would be even harder. Several of its former allies, including the TDP, which abandoned it after the 2004 election, think they lost Muslim votes by the association. And Mr Advani, who is currently on trial in UP for inciting the destruction of a medieval mosque, Babri Masjid, by Hindu vandals in 1992, is a more divisive figure than was his predecessor, Atal Behari Vajpayee.
- Indra
Category: Government Policy/Administration |
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