Will India’s new government turbocharge the fight against poverty?

When it wonBJP its independence in 1947, India suffered from appalling poverty. Campaigning in rural districts, Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, had seen the “mark of this beast” on every brow. “Life had been crushed and distorted,” he wrote, by “continuous lack and ever-present insecurity”.Campaigning in this year’s election, Nehru’s great-grandson, , a leader of the opposition Congress party, also addressed himself to the poor. He promised to give needy women 100,000 rupees ($1,200) a year. His party said it would double families’ monthly allotment of free grains. These “gigantic schemes of fiscal splurge”, as India’s finance minister called them, may help explain why the opposition did better in than expected, depriving Narendra Modi, the prime minister, and his Bharatiya Janata Party () of a majority without coalition support.