Amit Mitra, a prominent Indian business leader, put it best. “We were very worried that we were going to get a kedgeree,” he said, expressing widespread concern that India’s election would produce an inchoate mishmash of politicians and ideologies. Instead, the country’s regionally and caste-divided electorate has somehow combined to cook up an altogether better-planned menu – a Congress-led thali.
Having spent the past five weeks telling us that the result would be determined by local or factional issues, commentators are scrambling to impose a national narrative on the individual votes of 420m Indians. The electorate, we are now told, has collectively opted for modernism, stability, growth and governance. Thank goodness that votes for backwardness, instability, stagnation and corruption were unsuccessful.
Many wishful thinkers are going further, busily imposing their own agendas on the choice of a disparate majority. Favourite among these is the view of investors who have boldly interpreted the vote as a mandate for economic reform: privatisation, deregulation, fewer subsidies and easier hiring and firing. Yet there is little to indicate that such issues, studiously avoided by savvy politicians, swayed voters at all.
Trying to interpret what an electorate “meant” is never easy. Drawing sensible conclusions is harder still in India where national issues are all but drowned out in a cacophony of local politics.
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