India’s Economy Needs an Early Election

A rupee in free fall; a terrifyingly wide current-account deficit; a corrupt, stagnant bureaucracy: In 1991, then-Finance Minister Manmohan Singh helped to rescue India’s economy from that near-death experience with a slew of liberalizing reforms, setting the stage for two decades of growth. Today, facing a similar, if less existential, crisis as India’s prime minister, Singh may well be the man standing in the way of a solution.

Singh did not spark the rupee’s current nose dive, which touched a record low for the third day in a row on Tuesday. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke started the slide when he hinted that he might begin tapering the Fed’s quantitative-easing program later this year, driving up yields. International investors naturally began moving funds out of emerging markets, including India, and back to the U.S.