Policy change is not going to happen until we have political change. India needs a new leadership. India needs new politicians who believe in these new objectives — good governance and development.
Policy change needs the politicians in India to change. And that will only happen through one way – changing people’s voting behavior.
India is a democracy at the end of the day. We get a chance to elect our leaders every few years. The ballot box is the way the change needs to be done. Middle India, for the most part, doesn’t bother to go out and vote. It’s probably about 20-25% of people in middle India who actually go and vote. You know a long time ago, there was an apocryphal story in which someone asked Laloo Prasad Yadav, who stayed as the chief minister of Bihar,one of the poorer states of India for about 15 years, “How do you think you got re-elected? You kept getting re-elected without even doing any substantial work”. He said, “It is not the people who vote for me; it is the people who don’t vote for me who have kept me in power.”
They did not vote against him, and that’s the reality again and again in India. That needs to change.
