The awful, unchanging binary of elections

You cannot win an election without putting together a massive war chest

I voted for the first time in the 1984 elections when Rajiv Gandhi rode the sympathy wave following his mother’s assassination. As a 22-year-old casting a paper ballot in what was then the Calcutta South constituency, I had an awful binary to consider. I could vote for the Left Front, which ran the state very badly, and regularly indulged in violence and murder. Or, I could vote for the Congress, which had just carried out a monstrous genocide.

Every election since then has presented similarly terrible choices. My ideal political party would combine an ideology of being socially liberal and inclusive,