For every election cycle that the Congress gets to govern India, India suffers a generation’s setback. The dozen or so elections since India’s political independence that the Congress has won the right to rule India have set back India’s development by around 200 years. In that period, hundreds of millions of Indians have lived lives of utter destitution. Today one of out every two children below five is malnourished — the implications of which are so staggering in terms of retarded mental and physical development that it makes one weep bitter tears for the utter and needless waste of human potential.
Contrast where India is now relative to where it could have been — a developed nation — and it is easy to argue that the Congress must be responsible for hundreds of millions of premature deaths and billions of human years of misery. The cycle of poverty and misery gets one more boost today, another generation worth of opportunity lost, another couple of hundred million lives forced into horrible misery whose only redeeming feature would be that thankfully they will be short.
That’s the big picture and as I argue below, a short-term big picture. But it is better to take the long-term view of the big picture and if we do that, the view is not that devastating.
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