The audacity of hope

Mr Modi should press on with economic reforms

With resounding election victories in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, Narendra Modi is now the monarch of all he surveys in North India. Never before has the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) secured the kind of numbers in UP that it has this time under Mr Modi’s leadership. Coming as they did — smack in the middle of Mr Modi’s five-year term as prime minister — the February-March elections to five states can easily be viewed as a mid-term referendum on the PM’s rule. The result underscores the fact that Mr Modi is today the tallest political leader in the country, and,