One nation, many elections

India needs more elections, not fewer of them

India’s longest ever general election campaign has ended. It has been both tedious and exhausting. Few new issues or standout candidates have emerged. We have been starved of opinion polls for weeks and that has led to speculative excesses, both in conversation and in the stock markets — excesses that will no doubt survive the glut of unreliable exit polls with which we will be regaled tonight. Meanwhile, the model code of conduct severely restricts the process of policy making and legislation — while also failing to restrain powerful campaigners from rhetoric that should be far more circumscribed.

Indian elections