See 40% upside in 2-3 months: Shankar Sharma

Here is a verbatim transcript of Shankar Sharma's exclusive interview on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: How big an event is this for the stock market in your eyes?

A: I think this is an absolutely amazing set of results and it lays a foundation for a different India five, 10, 20 years from now. That is the central thing that I am focused on. It is a vote for peace, for stability, against hate-based politics, against divisive politics; it is a vote for the poor, for the rich, for the urban-dweller, for the rural-dweller, for Hindus, for Muslims. It is just an amazing verdict. My prediction before the election results were declared that the Congress would get 165-170 seats and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) would get through reasonably but more importantly, my prediction was that in two elections Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will come down to 40-60 seats. That is my long-term prediction on the politics of this country. So the long-term projections on the Sensex etc are secondary to me at the present moment.

It is my belief that this is a huge pendulum swing in the favour of the Congress that you are seeing. They have absolutely the right set of leaders to take the country forward. Rahul Gandhi's whole initiative to bring in youth into politics I see is as relevant as significant as Rajiv Gandhi's policy of liberalizing the IT industry, opening up telecom, the small car Maruti that was fructified under his watch. All those things were game changers for India twenty years later. India became a force to reckon with in the world because of IT, in telecom - Bharti goes to 10 crore subscribers - all the result of those policies in 1984-1985. I think what you are going to see now is 20 years later, our children will look back and say that this was the ultimate game changer on par with what happened in the 1984-1985 or what happened in 1991-1992 when Manmohan Singh became the Finance Minister of India.

Q: Is it a vote for an economy that will rebound faster than any of us expected on Friday?

A: It is like getting the news that you have been selected to play for India in a Test match. What do you do then? If I were that player, I would go out and celebrate that particular moment rather than start to worry about how am I going to handle Brett Lee or how am I going to handle Steve Harmison because that takes the edge of the whole event, those will be tough battles to fight. Nobody is going to give you an easy time when you are out there playing test cricket. But if you start worrying too much about that, you lose the fun of the moment. I think we should simply enjoy the fun of the moment that is the important thing. Live today, live the weekend rather than start worrying about the fiscal deficit and the global slowdown and our export growth and the index of industrial production (IIP) numbers, those problems have not gone away.

I think we have better tools now to handle those problems than we had on last Friday. Without the Left, I think the Congress is a very strongly pro-reform party and which is why I always say that I don't know from where people get the notion that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was the reformer and Congress was sort of anti-reform. The NDA built a few more roads - let us grant them that - but other than that the big path breaking reforms in India starting from Pandit Nehru's time of building a huge public sector, which was a drain for a number of years but today a large part of the wealth in the market has been created because of the listing of the PSUs over the last 15 years. So Congress is a very pro-reform party, it has great leadership right at the top, clean leadership, good government and now with Rahul Gandhi you will have a huge incorruptible second tier of future leaders. I think you will see very good reforms - given the constraints of the fiscal situation and the other situations, it may not be absolutely big bang but let us just hope for the best.

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