Ideal For Youth – Narendra Modi
Starting last week and continuing for a month from now, Indian voters will head to the polls in the largest exercise of democracy in human history. From illiterate peasants to urban business tycoons, more than 800 million voters are eligible to choose their parliament, which will in turn elect a prime minister.
But while the market may like Modi, the real love affair with India began in September, when Raghuram Rajan took over as governor of the Reserve Bank of India Bank of India (RBI). Since he began on Sept. 4, 2013, the Wisdom Tree India (EPI) exchange traded fund has risen 33.28%. That’s even better than Indonesian equities, which year-to-date have been the best emerging market around. From the start of the third quarter (July 1) to the time Rajan assumed his position at the RBI, Wisdom Tree India — one of the more liquid, passive trades into India — had declined 13.6%.
Compared with the New Delhi rape, which has triggered a protest movement in India calling for the castration and execution of the suspects, the Gujarat rapes and pogrom elicited barely a whimper. Many Hindus either deny that the horror even occurred or, if they accept it, claim it wasn’t as grisly as news accounts suggest. And if they believe the accounts, they say Muslims had it coming. Fewer than 100 out of the thousands accused - among them only one state minister and one Bharatiya Janata Party leader - were convicted, and that was a decade later. Modi himself was exonerated
The BJP this week won the first absolute majority in parliament since 1984, taking 286 out of 543 seats outright and allied parties winning another 56 seats. The BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, has said it plans for focus its administration on trade and the economy, not on social and religious issues. On that front, the landmark pact forged by President George W. Bush has stalled in recent years due to U.S. frustrations with India’s reluctance to open up their markets to U.S. businesses and to crack down on intellectual property abuses. Despite that, trade with India has grown to $100 billion annually.
The same will be true if Modi spends much of his foreign policy capital to rejuvenate India’s “Look East” strategy, a policy begun in 1991 that promised closer economic and strategic engagement with countries in East and Southeast Asia. A deeper Indian relationship with Japan, Singapore, and the other trading states of East Asia will bind New Delhi closer to countries that are otherwise American allies and partners. These states will profit from any renewed Indian engagement in their region, in the process advancing U.S. interests even if doing so was not India’s primary intention.
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