Development is a Tiger
Abstract:
The recent electoral victory of chief minister Nitish Kumar, who successfully placed Bihar on a high-growth trajectory, and the decisive defeat of Lalu Prasad, who presented himself as the champion of the underprivileged though without supporting evidence, offer an opportunity to probe more deeply the underlying change in voter attitude.
A good starting point for this investigation is the landmark parliamentary election of 2004 in which the favoured Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance suffered a surprising defeat. The press widely attributed this defeat to an "anti-incumbency" factor arising out of the "India Shining" policies of the BJP that neglected the rural poor. This explanation was inconsistent with the twin facts that rural poverty had indeed declined and there was no urban-rural divide in the voting pattern.