‘The difficulties of governance now are dauntingly stupendous’

Geoffrey Hawthorn writes about the Indian General Election

  • India’s Economic Reforms 1991-2001 by Vijay Joshi and I.M.D. Little
    Oxford, 288 pp, £25.00, September 1996, ISBN 0 19 829078 0

Fifteen thousand candidates contested 545 seats in the Indian lower house, the Lok Sabha, in the May General Election. Four hundred million of the 590 million who were eligible to do so voted. It was the largest election in history. Yet it might have seemed odd. The Congress Government has been introducing far-reaching reforms. But the economy was not discussed. India has more than a third of the world’s poor. But poverty was not an issue. Congress’s secularism has been challenged by ‘Hindu fundamentalists’. But the Bharatiya Janata, the Party that’s been mounting the challenge, scarcely mentioned religion. The quarrels were more political than religious, and even where candidates from Congress itself were concerned, largely local and particular.

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[*] India in Transition: Freeing the Economy Jagdish Bhagwati (Oxford, 108 pp., £18.95, 10 June 1993, 0 19 828816 6).

[†] India: Macroeconomics and Political Economy 1964-91 by Vijay Joshi and I.M.D. Little (World Bank and Oxford India), 397 pp., £12.99, 21 December 1994, 0 8213 2652 X).