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  • News & article

    What Modi has figured out that Trump never has

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 21/03/2024

    » Excitement and uncertainty used to accompany general elections in India. Polls swung back and forth, coalitions formed and reformed, analysts dissected policy platforms and assessed the prospects of hundreds of individual candidates. As India embarked on its 18th general election campaign on Tuesday, there is no electricity in the air. It is hard to find anyone who believes Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lose his bid for a third term in office.

  • News & article

    Modi needs to have less power, not more of it

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 23/05/2019

    » India's long and exhausting general election is almost over. One of its casualties has been the reputation of the Election Commission of India, the constitutionally independent body that oversees the polls.

  • News & article

    Nobody's got a clue on India's poll

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 14/03/2019

    » India's parliamentary elections are like no others in the world. Nine hundred million people are eligible to vote in 2019, for 573 constituencies -- the largest of which contains almost three million voters. The country will take 39 days to vote; some states, like giant Uttar Pradesh with a population of 200 million, will vote in seven stages. And, on May 23, we will get to know who won.

  • News & article

    Politics as usual in India again

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 05/02/2019

    » India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in a spot of trouble. He has to face reelection in a few months amid growing dissatisfaction with his government's performance; he's likely to use every lever available to eke out a win. One such lever, unfortunately, was the interim federal budget that his lame-duck government presented last week, to keep official machinery running till the next government can come in with a mandate and make decisions about taxation and spending. As many of us feared, Mr Modi broke with bipartisan convention: He used the occasion essentially to launch his election appeal to India's voters. And, unfortunately, it's one that they have heard before.

  • News & article

    Tarnishing a developing-world star

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 04/01/2019

    » Bangladesh under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina looks like a developing-world success story. Last year, its economy grew at close to 8% a year, faster than its neighbour India's. Its human development indicators, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen is fond of pointing out, are even better than its income level would indicate.

  • News & article

    The cost of a Modi election victory

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 14/12/2018

    » Many of us have long argued that, whatever its problems, India is one of the best long-term bets in the world for one simple reason: It has the sort of world-class institutions that can help build and sustain a genuine market economy. Sadly, many of those same institutions are being undermined by the country's own leaders -- most recently the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which Prime Minister Narendra Modi appear intent on subjugating as part of his bid for reelection. Of all people, Mr Modi should recognise that no election victory is worth giving up on India's best chance at becoming a world-beating economy.

  • News & article

    Imran Khan's election presents a global dilemma

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 01/08/2018

    » The cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan has finally been accepted as Pakistan's next prime minister. I say "finally" because the election commission managed to add to widespread concerns about the elections by inexplicably delaying its announcement of the outcome.

  • News & article

    Pakistan's army takes on wrong fight

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 16/07/2018

    » Nawaz Sharif -- dodgy businessman, convicted criminal and thrice prime minister of Pakistan -- showed on Friday, in his triumphant return to Pakistan, that he remains by far the country's most popular politician. Infuriatingly, he also represents Pakistan's best chance at becoming a "normal" country anytime soon. As he fights what looks very much like an attempt by the military to decide the next election, the rest of us should hope he succeeds.

  • News & article

    Modi should fear strength of opposition

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 22/05/2018

    » As a politician, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is distinguished by his relentlessness. Every vote, every constituency, every election matters. Mr Modi has built his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into an electoral juggernaut that runs 21 of India's 29 states; 70% of India's population is ruled by the BJP at both the state and the federal level.

  • News & article

    Bad healthcare tops public failings

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 22/08/2017

    » As India celebrated 70 years of independence last week, a tragedy in a remote corner of India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, highlighted how far the world's largest democracy still is from being able to provide a healthy life for most of its citizens. For all its talk of smart cities and industrial corridors, this is the government's greatest failing -- and one where it could make a big difference quickly.

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