Elections in India

Italian born Sonia Gandhi is probably the next prime minister in India. Her Congress Party, will probably enter a coalition with the communist. We hope that this won’t change India’s course too much. India opened its markets over the last decade and became one of the roaring tigers in Asia. Shortly in the beginning of this year, it was the world’s fastest growing economy. Everybody associates India with outsourcing, offshoring, and software development.

But analyst say that it is the rural population that was left behind in a geographic area where electricity, jobs and clean water are still luxuries and which punished the ruling BJP-led National Democratic Alliance and current prime minister Vajpayee. It shouldn’t be forgotten that despite all its success more than 300 million billion Indians still survive on less than one US dollar a day.

Analysts also speculate that the voters punished the current government for initiating a peace process with neighbouring Pakistan (Xinhua General News Service, May 14, 2004).

We have to see what happens next in India – but this is democracy, and it should be mentioned that this year, Asia made great strikes in democracy with elections in the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Korea etc. So changing governments is a normal process.