The best use of his store of political capital is to undertake big ticket economic reforms.



When a small Takshashila team walked around Bangalore’s wholesale markets, Dobbspet town and a few tiny village in the latter’s vicinity as part of our #FootNote initiative, we noticed many people reporting that they were not only inconvenienced but suffered monetary losses, yet supported Narendra Modi’s currency reform (‘demonetisation’) initiative. This is counter-intuitive, except perhaps in the context of religious faith.

To better understand this phenomenon, I conducted a twitter poll earlier this week that sought to investigate to what extent have people conflated their opinion of Prime Minister Modi and his currency reform initiative.

The results, after just over 1800 responses, were as follows:

On the India’s currency reform (popularly known as #Demonetisation), I support: — Nitin Pai (@acorn) 22 November 2016

Obviously, there is no claim that this poll is representative of the entire population of India. It is more likely representative of the forty thousand or so people who follow my twitter handle. Even so, the responses are interesting, and support what we noticed on the #FootNote tour.

What does this mean? As Karthik Shashidhar, our resident quant, remarked, in 87% of the respondents there is an overlap between their opinion of Mr Modi and his policy. In other words, people’s attitude towards him overshadows their opinion of his policy. My colleague Nidhi Gupta, who recently reviewed Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’ Democracy for Realists (Princeton University Press), that exposes the flaws of democratic systems, noted that in this case too, the notion that people vote on issues does not seem to hold up.

We’ll repeat the poll again in January to see how much the responses change.

In any event, the upshot is that the demonetisation episode shows that Mr Modi enjoys tremendous political capital that he can use to implement the type of structural reforms that would be extremely difficult for other leaders to pull off.

He should not lose the opportunity.

Postscript: Mr Modi’s team conducted their own poll using his smartphone app. Both the framing of the questions and the type of sample suggest that the poll is essentially a device to rally his supporters rather than obtain an objective estimate of public opinion. It would be wrong to assume it reflects what Indians think, just as it would be wrong to use my twitter poll for the same purpose.