The Indian Elections

by Patrick Appel

A mini-roundup of reaction to the big international news of the weekend. Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute decodes:

Internationally, the Indian election results and the performance of its economy during the crisis raise the question of whether the Indian approach to globalizationnot too much foreign finance like the Eastern Europeans and not too export reliant as Chinahas some merit.  Goldilocks globalization and dynastic democracy is the model that India is offering the world.

Rory Medcalf:

The Indian election results announced at the weekend amount to an unexpected and dramatic win for global stability. Hundreds of millions of Indian voters defied predictions that they would support sectarian, regional and caste-based parties and thus entrench new depths of deadlock in the world's largest democracy. Instead, in a mass act of enlightened self-interest, they returned the secular Congress-led government of Dr Manmohan Singh with a massively increased majority of seats, reversing three decades of worsening atomisation and parochialism in Indian politics.

Chris Devonshire-Ellis:

A government mandate, and a unified party directed by economists and lawyers bent on legal reform are likely to have a huge impact in getting through legislation to open up to competition within India’s domestic markets, encourage foreign direct investment, deal with the legal and investment issues concerning infrastructure development, and place the nation on a fast track to reform much as China was able to achieve in the 1990s.

The implications are going to be huge.
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