Last year, Abhijit Banerjee, professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, delivered a lecture at the London School of Economics. He expanded on an experiment carried out by him in an assembly constituency in India, wherein he established that if a political party genuinely explained and urged an electorate to vote for development rather than on a caste basis, they are likely to do so. Then, in answer to a question, he effectively said, it is imperative to have Congress back in office in India.
Banerjee was among over a dozen internationally renowned economists consulted by Praveen Chakravarty, chairman of