UP election shows that reforms, not the Gandhi name, will win future polls
Rahul and Sonia Gandhi should lend the Prime Minister a hand in moving the reforms forward just as Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had once done.
So much has already been written on the UP elections that one might ask what more is there to say. Yet, the subject is so fascinating that it is hard to resist.
Outcomes in state level elections have lately come to depend critically, though surely not exclusively, on the performance of the incumbent government.
Outcomes in state level elections have lately come to depend critically, though surely not exclusively, on the performance of the incumbent government.
As Jagdish Bhagwati and I had originally hypothesised in 2004, the post-1991 reforms had demonstrated that rapid improvement in the economic fortunes was possible and had consequently unleashed a revolution of rising expectations. According to this hypothesis, embraced by numerous commentators recently, voters reward performing governments and punish nonperforming ones. Because individuals think of the state government as having the greatest impact on their lives, this effect operates with potency at the level of the state.