Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Democracy on the Road by Ruchir Sharma RUCHIR SHARMA. On the eve of a landmark general election, Ruchir Sharma offers an unrivalled portrait of how India and its democracy work, drawn from his two decades on the road chasing election campaigns across every major state, travelling the equivalent of a lap around the earth. Democracy on the Road takes readers on a rollicking ride with Ruchir and his merry band of fellow writers as they talk to farmers, shopkeepers and CEOs from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu, and interview leaders from Narendra Modi to Rahul Gandhi. No book has traced the arc of modern India by taking readers so close to the action. Offering an intimate view inside the lives and minds of India's political giants and its people, Sharma explains how the complex forces of family, caste and community, economics and development, money and corruption, Bollywood and Godmen, have conspired to elect and topple Indian leaders since Indira Gandhi. The ultimately encouraging message of Ruchir's travels is that, while democracy is retreating in many parts of the world, it is thriving in India. Reviews. "For a quarter of a century, Ruchir Sharma has been doing in India what political pundits should have done in the US, UK and France to understand Donald Trump, Brexit and the gilets jaunes protestors: he has left the big cities and listened to voters in the mofussil or provincial parts of the subcontinent. . Above all, the trips allowed Sharma to predict and understand the rise of the Bharatiya Janata party's charismatic Narendra Modi, the collapse and later revival of the Congress party under the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and the enduring influence of regional politicians such as Nitish Kumar in Bihar and the late J Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu." — Financial Times. "Sharma's account of his travels offers a fascinating insight into the quixotic characters populating India's political landscape. Along the way, we meet mavericks and ministers, holy men and hoaxers. Sharma is a diligent, informed and sympathetic guide." — Prospect. "A high-speed, breezy drive through two decades of electoral politics" — Bloomberg. "Packed with nuance and detail of the many Indias that make India." — Vogue. Democracy on the Road: A 25 Year Journey through India. On the eve of a landmark general election, Ruchir Sharma offers an unrivalled portrait of how India and its democracy work, drawn from his two decades on the road chasing election campaigns across every major state, travelling the equivalent of a lap around the earth. Democracy on the Road takes readers on a rollicking ride with Ruchir and his merry band of fellow writers as they talk to farmers, shopkeepers and CEOs from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu, and interview leaders from Narendra Modi to Rahul Gandhi. No book has traced the arc of modern India by taking readers so close to the action. Offering an intimate view inside the lives and minds of India's political giants and its people, Sharma explains how the complex forces of family, caste and community, economics and development, money and corruption, Bollywood and Godmen, have conspired to elect and topple Indian leaders since Indira Gandhi. The ultimately encouraging message of Ruchir's travels is that, while democracy is retreating in many parts of the world, it is thriving in India. Review Packed with nuance and detail of the many Indias that make India (Vogue) A must read in this election season! (Nandan Nilekani) A must, must, must and very 'mast' read! Insightful and deliciously wicked (Shobhaa De) An immediate must-read. A definitive one-volume on the modern India (Tom Keene, Bloomberg. Book review of Ruchir Sharma: Democracy on the Road. Currently, in seven phases from April 11 until May 19, 2019 some 900 million Indians are eligible to vote in the parliamentary election to constitute the 17th Lok Sabha. An excellent commentary to the election marathon in the world’s largest democracy comes from Ruchir Sharma, the Indian born chief global strategist and head of the emerging markets equity team at Morgan Stanley. In his new, at the same time entertaining and insightful book Democracy on the Road. A 25-Year Journey through India (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de), he brings to life India. He has been following at least one big regional or national election every year since 1993. Ruchir Sharma’s previous books include the international bestsellers Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles (2012; Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com) and The Rise and Fall of Nations (2016; Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com). In 1998, in order to call the next elections accurately, Ruchir Sharma suggested to his boss that they needed to get out on the streets and talk to actual voters. A key lesson, which would be driven home on every trip for the next 20 years, was that India is thinly diced between thousands of castes and hundreds of languages, many isolated in a pocket inside a single state, that India is better understood as many countries than one. The reality of the “Many” Indias is a source of great controversy, particularly among the nationalists who would like to live in a country united under one culture. Ruchir Sharma insists that there is no other way to think about India that can explain the way its democracy works, or why its elections are so full of surprises. Ruchir Sharma cites Hindustan Unilever’s CEO Sanjiv Mehta who told him that his company divides the 29 Indian states info 14 sub-regions, the 20 countries of the Middle East and North Africa into only 4, because its research shows, consumer tastes, habits and languages are far more fragmented in India. Ruchir Sharma compares India to the United States, itself a melting pot of immigrants from many nations, where a poll of just 1000 to 2000 randomly choses people can produced an election forecast with a relatively small margin of error. I would add that exactly that strategy did not work regarding Trump’s election; pollsters got the overall majority for Clinton more or less right, but the presidential election was decided on the state level. But that’s an other story, and Ruchihr Sharma is of course right that most of the time the US polls are correct whereas, in India, pollsters have to survey tens of thousands of people just to get a partial sample of its diverse voters, and yet their record for accuracy is dismal. There are too many Indias to capture in one poll, or one trip, which has made life on the road for Ruchir Sharma and the colleagues traveling with him endlessly fascinating and inspiring. The author states that, early on, he feared that the sprawling populations and scattered loyalities of the 29 states embodied more chaos than any one leader could ever govern effectively, but over time he came to realize that there is a way to govern India effectively: by letting its diverse states govern themselves, each under its own leader. India has so many parties because it has so many different communities, separated by caste, religion, tribe or language. And each one wants its own representative. Ruchir Sharma does not intend to paint a rosy picture of India. He is aware of its broken state and the endemic corruption but, in the end, he comes away with deep optimism that democracy works in India because, for instance, the voters toss out its governing class more often than any other country he knows. At the same time, he concludes that real powern in India resides with the political, not the economic class. And yet, for all their clout, in contrast to most Western societies, the odds are against Indian politicians holding on to their offices. India became a democracy when it was still poor. And the poor cherish the vote as a great leveller. Local issues often trump national ones, and very dramatically from state to state. Corruption scandals have lead to many electoral defeats, e.g. in the case of Rajiv Gandhi and the Bofors case. However, one of the supreme ironies of Indian politics is that corruption charges seem to hurt more than convictions. Voters are so sure that justice in India is loaded against innocents, they often look more sympathetically on leaders emerging from jail, e.g. Lalu Yadav. In other emerging countries, politicians may come back after a jail term, but rearely do lock-ups provide a career boost, the way they do in India. Studies show that jail time is like a badge of honor. Supporters praise the current prime minister Modi for raising India’s stature in the world. But Ruchir Sharma reminds readers that, more than once, Indian leaders—from Manmohan Singh to Chandrababu Naidu—lionized by the global elite from Mumbai to New York, have been thrown out be Indian voters who care more about the government’s impact on their daily life than about such cosmic concerns as India’s image in the world. Even a growth rate above the national level is no recipe for success. Inflation and droughts on the other hand are much more likely to have a negative impact. Community identity is still the key to politics in India. Community, family, inflation, welfare, development, corruption and money are the key factors for success identified by Ruchir Sharma. A candidate has to appeal to the complex mix of sub-castes, religions and languages in each constituency and state. Rarely does one community or identity define even 30% of the population. The “dominant” communities often include not more than 10% to 20% of the electorate, as for example is the case in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Often community ties are so powerful that even leaders without charisma and/or dazzling oratory and/or good (especially fair-skinned) looks can build a devoted following: Mayawati, Mulayam, Jayalalithaa. Economic ideas do not play the same role in India that they do elsewhere. In more advanced democracies the main ideological divide involves the role of the state versus the free market in distributing wealth. Ruchir Sharma stresses that, in India, everyone is a statist: how can the state best help the poor? India’s political DNA is fundamentally socialist and statist and runs through the veins of all the leading parties. Economic success, a growth rate above the national average, a rising stock market in Mumbai, all this helps at the margin (at best). The fate of incumbents is rather decided by inflation, particularly food price inflation. Double-digit GDP growth may help, but not for sure, whereas double- digit inflation rarely produces no (negative) result at the ballot box; e.g. inflation killed the re-election of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2014. Regarding the voices who fear that the rising (Hindu) nationalism (by the BJP) is threatening India’s democracy, Ruchir Sharma reminds readers that they tend to underestimate the check provided by subnationational pride. Many Indians still see themselves first as Bengalis, Maharashtrians, Tamils, Gujaratis or Telugus, and they are much more likely to support a strongman (or woman) at the state level than in Delhi. The autor believes that India is too heterogeneous to be dominated by populist nationalism. In conclusion, Ruchir Sharma is confident that in an era when democracy is said to be in retreat worldwide, it is thriving in India. Ruchir Sharma: Democracy on the Road. A 25-Year Journey through India. Allen Lane, Penguin Random House India, 2019, 389 pages. Order the book from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amaz0n.fr, Amazon.de. Democracy on the Road is the source for this article. For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations are not put between quotation marks. Review: Democracy on the Road by Ruchir Sharma. Democratic elections anywhere are complicated business. And they are even more complicated in India because of its sheer diversity. Every state - and within each state, every sub region - has its own particularities. There are a wide number of political forces. The caste structure is incredibly complex, and its intersection with political mobilisation takes many forms. And then issues of development and livelihoods play out in different ways in different settings. To distill all this into a coherent neat story and provide a sense - let alone a firm prediction - of how any election will play out is challenging. Indeed, as a top Congress leader, who has been involved with elections since the 1960s, once told this writer, “You can only understand an Indian election after the election is over.” Ruchir Sharma, now a top New York-based leader in global finance, understood this early on. Even as global professionals sought to interpret and predict electoral battles by speaking to the regular intermediaries of knowledge in Delhi and Mumbai, Sharma figured there can be no substitute to hitting the road. And so back in 1998, he began covering elections with a small group of colleagues and friends from the media. This group has over the last two decades expanded considerably and now includes senior journalists, columnists, and policy wonks. Sharma has covered 27 elections - spanning both Lok Sabha and multiple state polls - in this period. And the book is an outcome of this experience. There are four ways to read this book. The first is to treat this as a racy, historical account of how Indian polls have evolved since the late 90s. It gives you a glimpse into the big national polls - from the return of Vajpayee after the failure of the United Front years in 1998 to his second victory, this time for a full term, after Kargil in 1999; how the India Shining campaign faltered in 2004; the return of Manmohan Singh in 2009; and eventually the wave election which propelled Narendra Modi to power in 2014. But its more valuable contribution is in its coverage of the state polls, be it in Uttar Pradesh where incumbents kept getting thrown out of office and caste alliances kept changing to Bihar where Nitish Kumar brought in a different vocabulary of politics since 2005 or Rajasthan where anti incumbency almost seems like a strongly etched principle of polls. To those familiar with Indian politics, this will appear basic and perfunctory. But to those seeking a quick overview of the actors, forces, and issues which have driven politics over the last two decades, this is a useful snapshot. A second way to read this book is to focus on the colour and anecdotes, but most significantly, the conversations with top political actors. The fact that Sharma and his cohort were exceptionally well connected and influential opened doors and provided access that most covering elections from the ground would not get. And this provided them insights. Three conversations stood out. Sharma got a meeting with Sonia and Rahul Gandhi back in 2002 and made a strong pitch for radical market reforms (Manmohan Singh, who Sharma knows well, had told him that no reforms programme would move without the backing of the Gandhis.) Both Sonia and Rahul were skeptical, were not sure about the impact of the reforms on the poor, and strongly defended the role of the government. Sharma and his group had two conversations with Narendra Modi. The first one was during the Gujarat elections of 2007, where NDTV’s Prannoy Roy in particular aggressively pushed Modi on the 2002 riots. Modi wanted to push the conversation to development, but Roy and others did not let go. The then Gujarat CM ended the conversation, refused to stay for dinner, and told Sharma, “What happened here isn’t good.” A few years later, in 2009, the group accosted him at a rally in Maharashtra where he was campaigning for the party. Modi relented to give time, but the first question to him was about Ishrat Jahan. Modi walked out, and refused to meet them after that. The PM’s suspicion of the English media in particular, and his disdain for ‘political pundits’ can perhaps be traced to such conversations. And the final set of conversations are particularly revealing of Rahul Gandhi’s evolution. Even as Gandhi now emphasises, quite often, the virtues of listening, it is striking that when Sharma and his colleagues met him in 2007, during UP assembly elections, at a hotel in Moradabad, Gandhi spoke straight for one-hour 59 minutes over a two-hour dinner. They subsequently met him in 2012 in Gujarat, and 2013 in Rajasthan. By this time however, Sharma writes that they sensed a change; Gandhi was more willing to listen, asked questions, but was emphatic and flagged off the perils of one-man rule in the backdrop of Modi’s slow rise to power. Ruchir Sharma (Karol DuClos) A third way to read this book is to focus on Sharma’s big conclusions, based on his ground experiences. Based on what a Karnataka politician once told him, Sharma says that a candidate in an Indian election has to get over 35 marks in six tests simultaneously. And these tests span the areas of community (caste and religion); family (either of being a dynast or paradoxically being single and selling that as a mark of commitment to public service and integrity); inflation (though in recent years, low inflation has caused a dip in farmer incomes and created a new constituency of discontent); welfare and development (of which there is no one right formula; Sharma concludes that even palpable economic success may not bring electoral success); and finally, corruption and money. And a final way to read this book is not to just treat it as one about Indian elections, but also as an anthropological text of how the Indian elite covers the elections. The desperate search for comfortable hotels even if it means traveling long distances in the midst of some extreme deprivation; the composition of the group itself, which appears to be dominated largely by upper castes even as it is attempting to understand subaltern politics; and the complete absence of coverage from the Northeast or Kashmir - all tell us something about the Indian elite and the limits of its intersection with mass political processes. Sharma spent the summers of his childhood at his maternal grandfather’s house in west UP’s Bijnor district. This is where his interest in politics grew. It is also perhaps why Sharma’s understanding of the centrality of identity - particularly caste - is astute, a trait most of his contemporaries in the corporate would probably lack. Sharma returned to Bijnor to conclude his book, and insightfully traced the transformation - or lack of it - over the past three decades in the district. Sharma’s ability to weave in the personal and political; grasp the big picture trends from the micro events and conversations; and immersion into Indian electoral battles makes this a valuable read. Book review: Democracy on the Road by Ruchir Sharma. Indian elections are as complex and diverse as the people. The pageant riot of colours and slogans need not give an insight into a voter’s mind. Gauging the popular mood is not an easy task. Pollsters often err in assessing what sways Indian voters. They struggle to look for a winning formula. But what is clear is that the voters have developed a knack of throwing out unpopular governments, making our democracy vibrant. Ever since the Congress defeat in 1977, anti-incumbency has become a key factor in elections. Ruchir Sharma, a New York-based investment banker and author, offers a snapshot on Indian democracy in action in his book Democracy on the Road: A 25-Year Journey Through India . The work is the outcome of his road trips chasing the campaigns over the years, leading a convoy of elite journalists across the states. Sharma has managed to cover 27 elections. What make the book immensely readable are the anecdotes and the portraits of key political figures it offers. The backstage interviews with leaders throw light on the less-known facets of the persona. Sharma recounts his meeting with L K Advani, who was certain of becoming prime minister in 2009. He even discussed his future cabinet and names of key ministers. Lalu Prasad Yadav, who introduces his horses and cows by name; imperious Mayawati appearing casual in private meetings; tech-savvy Chandrababu Naidu talking on welfarism; and Mamata Banerjee in no-holds-barred campaign against the Marxists spice up the book. There is also the portrait of an RSS leader sitting under a map of Akhand India sans borders. Sharma and his group had none too pleasant encounters with Narendra Modi. While the journalists wanted to quiz him on Gujarat riots, Modi wanted to talk on development. He was dismissive of questions on riots and walked out, reinforcing his suspicion of English media. The run-in with Amit Shah was no different. An unabashed votary of free market, Sharma pins hopes on economic reforms to transform India and pines for the emergence of a charismatic free-market reformer like Ronald Reagan. But he finds our political leaders hesitant to tread the path of reforms. In 2002, he met Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi pitching for free-market reforms and found them skeptical on the issue. He was hoping against hope that Modi will focus more on economic than sectarian issues. Modi’s thrust on nationalism above development compels Sharma to compare him with Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin. Sharma realises that good economic growth and visible economic improvements are no guarantees for the re-election of a government in India. The book cites the cases of Chandrababu Naidu, Nitish Kumar and P V Narasimha Rao being voted out despite achieving high GDP growth rates. Extensive travels opened the eyes of city-based journalists on the harsh realities of rural life. Pathetic condition of roads in parts of Bihar and UP, poverty and squalor were eye-openers. Democracy On The Road gives an overview of how Indian elections have evolved in the past two decades. It tracks polity since Vajpayee’s second victory for a full term; the flop show of India Shining in 2004; the return of Manmohan Singh in 2009; and finally, the wave election which swept Narendra Modi to power in 2014. The coverage of state polls mirrors the changing caste equations and the enduring hold of regional leaders. Mayawati’s successful experiment of wooing Brahmins, Nitish Kumar’s alliance of most backwards with upper castes, politics of freebies that made Jayalalitha unassailable, visits to Nandigram and Singur that witnessed violent backlash against CPI (M) are dealt at length. The book analyses how Gujarat became a springboard for the national ambitions of Modi. Influential and well connected, Sharma and his group had easy access that an ordinary reporter on an election beat is denied. This provided them rare insights. An early lesson Sharma learnt was that local issues outweighed national issues and the stranglehold of castes. However, the treatment of state issues is rather fleeting and at times patronising. Sharma, while expressing optimism on the future of democracy in India, doesn’t hazard a prediction on the outcome of this general election. He is content to observe that if the opposition parties put up a united fight, Modi government won’t get another term. Democracy On The Road is a ready reckoner for those seeking an overview of the players, forces and issues that have shaped politics over the last two decades. Also watch : This election season, Ruchir’s group of journalists went to Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. He shared his findings in a conversation with DH Editor Sitaraman Shankar .