We have many 'poverty' parties, and not enough 'development' parties. The poverty parties are good at ensuring that poverty continues - they've done it for decades. There is some improvement for the top quartile, but as a whole, what they've ensured is widespread poverty.

No poor country in the world has become developed through the leadership of poverty parties. Ever. That's not how development happens. At some point, the nations that succeeded had one party (or more) that dramatically shook up things and decided to go on a very different course.

We haven't had that yet. Whether national or regional ... none of them has ever put out a roadmap for prosperity that plainly abandons the old way of doing things. What they promise is a better way of doing the old things, which is why we're roughly where we were earlier.

Think about it. Many of the poorest states in India have had long stints in leadership by a single party or person. Maybe that's why they're still poor. Tossing out people for non-performance may look like instability, but it has the advantage of signalling the right things.

Most elections are a swap of poverty parties, with no reason to expect a different path. There have been glimpses of hope, in a few states, occasionally, but nothing that adds up the kind of acceleration in prosperity that South Korea or Botswana saw, for example.

There are those who hope that their favourite party could be the one to break this norm. Time is the best test of these things - if the party has been in power anywhere for ten years and there isn't a POPULAR and PROVEN narrative about what it did, you can bury your hope.