When a centre-left political party notches up a dramatic victory, public discourse sometimes gets flooded with talk of redemptive change. An unexceptionable base argument is used to create a fancy superstructure.
Put this argument to test in two cases. Barack Obama’s win in America in 2008 and the Congress’s win in India in 2004. The unexceptional base argument in both cases is that parties of the centre-right who had grown politically arrogant were humbled by voters. That’s deserved punishment. But centre-left enthusiasm ascribes to these verdicts a radical political-economic cohesiveness that’s simply not there.

So the Congress’s win was interpreted and continues to be interpreted as a popular verdict against economic reform. Those who say this won’t look at facts presented many times. The BJP lost in urban centres, where reform beneficiaries live. The Congress didn’t sweep poorer states like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, where the BJP did relatively well. From the time the Congress lost monopoly over national power, all national incumbents bar two have lost. So 2004 was the rule, not the exception.

From the mid-1980s, all governments abandoned reforms mid-term, much before general elections came around. Therefore, governments went to voters minus fresh-in-mind reformist activism. Clearly, therefore, it’s hard to make a case that the 2004 Indian verdict was a “revolt of the peasants”, as the Guardian had so nicely and so wrongly put it.

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