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Letters | Why Narendra Modi should not be written off despite his party’s loss in Delhi’s local elections
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Why you can trust SCMP
Both the letter “Voters of Delhi have rejected divisive politics” and the column “India’s boisterous democracy works to benefit a few” (February 19) cheer the resounding re-election of Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party in recent elections in New Delhi.
In 2018, a year before the national elections that won Prime Minister Narendra Modi a second term, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost successive state elections. Yet it went on to win the general elections in May 2019 with bigger margins.
A columnist in The New York Times cautions liberals against drawing any joyous conclusions: “In a recent survey, four-fifths of Delhi’s voters favoured Mr Modi and three-fourths of Delhi’s voters expressed satisfaction with his federal government.” Other surveys conducted before the elections arrived at similar conclusions.
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Yet, the people of Delhi voted for Kejriwal. The reasons: his good work in some sectors and offer of freebies, but also the maturity of voters who vote the BJP into power at the centre and the opposition in local elections.
Economically speaking, most countries except the United States are in bad shape. In this age of globalisation, no country’s economy can be insulated.
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