BLUE INDIA:

India's poor bring back Gandhi clan: Vajpayee resigned Thursday, as a surprise election upset put Sonia Gandhi's Congress Party on top. (Scott Baldauf, 5/14/04, CS Monitor)

Prem Shankar Jha, a senior political analyst in New Delhi, says the voter reaction was entirely predictable, given the BJP's primary focus on the urban middle class and rich Indians.

"Five years of unemployment and a sharp increase in class differences are responsible for this vote," says Mr. Jha. "Politics has always divided along traditional lines of caste and ethnicity, but this time, there's been a strong divide between rich and poor."

But while Jha says the Congress will shift the government's policies to focus on the problems of poorer Indians, Congress is unlikely to abandon reform altogether. Instead it is likely to pump government money into needed infrastructure projects like electrical power plants and highways, all in an effort to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. It will also slow down the pace of reform, delaying efforts to take away subsidies that benefit middle and lower income households, on items like cooking gas, electricity, or education.

Bhargava says the results took people by surprise mostly because the urban Indian chattering class - including politicians, academics, and news reporters - are themselves cut off from rural India.

"It's very typical of people who rely on urban media for their information," he says. "They get taken in by their own hype, and start believing that it's true. The BJP completely lost touch with the people."

Some things are the same everywhere, eh?

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 13, 2004 6:43 PM