The more politicians who get the message, the better governance
will become and the more democracy will help India grow,
economists and political scientists say. “The lesson is that
people want delivery, and part of that delivery is growth,” said
Arvind Panagariya, an economics professor at Columbia
University, adding that “brazen” corruption also has
increasingly swayed voters. “In India, the perception is that
everybody is corrupt. The mere fact of corruption everybody
accepts. But if it becomes excessive, if there is nothing covert
about it, that hurts you.” The old cliche about India is that
the electorate did not so much cast their votes as vote for
their caste. The fracturing of politics into caste-based parties
seemed to make a mockery of democracy, and one study showed that
the more people voted along caste lines instead of on merit, the
more corrupt were the politicians they elected. Democracy seemed
to give poor people the power to throw politicians out of office
every five years, but not to improve