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The Sonia Shock — page 2
On the face of it, Vajpayee, 79, and his government had everything going for them. The economy was on fire, rocketing by 10.4% in the last quarter of 2003. The country's IT industry, accused in Europe and the U.S. of siphoning jobs away, was enabling growing numbers of Indians to attain middle-class status. Vajpayee was talking peace with Pakistan about the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, over which the two countries had fought two wars. India's cricketers had beaten Pakistan. In all, India, said the BJP campaign ads, was "shining." And so, as the pro-BJP newspaper the Pioneer mourned in a front-page headline the morning after the result: WHY?
The answer can be found in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Their respective capitals, Hyderabad and Bangalore, have become bywords for India's bid to conquer the world of IT and outsourcing. Yet the Chief Ministers of both states were handed the worst political defeats of the election. In Andhra Pradesh, N. Chandrababu Naidu saw the number of his party's parliamentary seats slashed from 29 to just 5 and its representation in the state assembly plunge from 180 seats to 45. In Karnataka, S.M. Krishna resigned after his party won just 8 of its previous 28 Parliament seats and just more than a quarter of the state assembly's.
Their defeats did not have anything to do with party politics—Naidu leads the Telugu Desam Party, which is allied to the BJP, while Krishna is a Congress man. But while the transformation of Hyderabad and Bangalore into shining showcases of business parks, Internet cafés and call centers may have delighted the managers of IBM and Microsoft, it failed to impress the overwhelming majority of Indian voters who still live on the land. This resentment goes deeper than the usual imbalance in developing economies between town and country. In southern India, the income gap is tragic. While surveys of spending show software technicians and back-office workers are consuming 12% more every year through eating out, buying the latest TVs, hanging out in Bangalore's bars and shopping for Hyderabad's famous pearls, thousands of poverty-stricken farmers have killed themselves. In the Andhra Pradesh market town of Anantapur alone, more than 2,000 have committed suicide since 1997. Nor are such contrasts confined to these two states. In the prosperous southwest of India, average incomes are 10 times higher than those in the hardscrabble northeast. And while the IT industry drives much of India's growth, it employs just 800,000 people. That's a figure dwarfed by a nationwide work force of 363 million, a jobless total of 35 million, and the 83 million residents of India's poorest state, Bihar, where more than half the population cannot read or write and where some 40%, like 370 million other Indians, live on $1 or less a day. In the dirt-poor Bihari city of Chapra, rickshaw driver Suryanarayan Pandey, 30, dismisses the very idea of politicians trying to change the persistent poverty around him. "Those born poor in this land die poor in this land," he says.
Economists agree that unemployment and inequality are India's most pressing problems. They add that the situation is likely to deteriorate. With population growth of 2%, or 20 million more Indians a year, notes Mahesh Vyas of the Mumbai-based Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, the country needs to create anywhere from 75 million to 150 million jobs in the next seven years just to ensure the unemployment rate stays stable. That, he adds, would also require a minimum annual GDP growth of 10%. "You'd have to say the probability is that things won't work out," says Vyas dryly. As Naidu told TIME: "There's only so much you can do."
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As reform pulls more Indians above the poverty line, they are moving their expectations higher. The voter is more unforgiving, demanding, tougher to fool. 
