After a decade in power, India’s Congress party appears to have lost both the ability and the will to push through the reforms the country needs to grow and provide jobs for the millions of young Indians who are joining the labor market each year.
The only alternative in the elections that start on Monday is Narendra Modi, the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate. (more…)
After a disastrous election defeat and a stint as absentee leader of the opposition, Lal Krishna Advani finally resigned from India’s opposition conservative party on Monday at the culmination of its national conference held in Goa. That conference was meant to sew up the final minutiae of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral strategy for next year’s general election. The Indian press labeled the resignation as some kind of major churning being set in motion.
Ostensibly this churn is a result of the meteoric rise of Narendra Modi, the supposedly divisive chief minister of Gujarat state. Advani, as the story goes, believed Modi’s divisiveness to be detrimental to the party’s electoral prospects. The reality is that Advani, like most Indian politicians, used identity politics to further his own career. This had little to do with inclusiveness and everything to do with an internal power struggle. (more…)
In a democracy, charisma and leadership are often overstated. Yet no other form of government needs leadership as much as democracy.
In this sense, India can offer a curious case. Despite having so many regional satraps with mass following, very few have been able to project their clout at the national level. Moreover, one regional satrap is not unusually viewed with suspicion by another so that the general consensus is to have somebody with no mass following at all. Incumbent prime minister Manmohan Singh is a perfect example of this.
Gujarat’s chief minister Narendra Modi defies the rule. The conservative politician has a mass following as well as national appeal. As his state votes in assembly elections next week, Modi’s future will be decades. If he leads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party to victory once more, he could emerge as the party’s prime ministerial candidate in the next general election. (more…)
