The Financial Times
Victor Mallet
- India’s PM is under fire for his silence on non-economic issues
Gone is the confident, mocking Narendra Modi of the 2014 election campaign, when he would promise the crowds economic development for all and poke fun at the dynastic leaders of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi and her “princeling” son Rahul.
Mr Modi, prime minister for nearly two years since the Bharatiya Janata party’s sweeping victory, was defensive and resentful this week when he spoke to farmers at a political rally in the eastern state of Odisha.
He complained about foreign-funded non-government organisations and said his opponents could not accept the idea of a chai wallah — a tea-boy — becoming prime minister. “They are now hatching conspiracies every day to finish and defame me,” he said.
Until now Mr Modi’s most important challenges have been economic. Although the Indian economy is officially growing at more than 7 per cent a year, one of the fastest rates in the world, his government has struggled to create jobs for the 1m young Indians who enter the workforce each month.
Nor has Mr Modi been able to enact reforms on tax, labour and land acquisition seen by business as essential for India’s prosperity. After parliament reopened on Tuesday for this year’s budget session — finance minister Arun Jaitley’s budget is on February 29 — politicians predict the Congress party will again use its influence in the upper house to block the passage of a goods and services tax designed to eliminate a plethora of state taxes and turn India into a single market.
Now Mr Modi faces a flare-up of political crises as well. In the state of Haryana on the fringes of Delhi, members of the landed Jat caste — relatively privileged but often poorly educated and jobless — have gone on the rampage to demand inclusion in government job and education quotas for lower castes. Nineteen people have been killed and it fell to the army to seize control of a canal supplying water to the national capital.
In Delhi, BJP leaders played into the hands of their liberal and leftwing opponents by condoning the arrest and beating of a student leader on a charge of sedition. He and other students arrested later were alleged to have chanted “antinational” slogans and spoken against the death penalty imposed on a Kashmiri convicted of terrorism. Mrs Gandhi said the government seemed to have lost “all sense of balance and proportion” and appeared determined to undermine democracy. Mr Modi, despite being the elected leader of India’s 1.3bn people, has so far remained silent on these and other outbreaks of violence and instead has continued with a frenzied travel schedule; in January this included a trip to Sikkim, where a new variety of orchid was named after him.
“I find his behaviour increasingly odd,” says Ramachandra Guha, a historian who is baffled by Mr Modi’s failure to capitalise on the way he inspired young voters with hope for the future during his election campaign two years ago. “It’s unclear what the prime minister thinks about all this [trouble], because he’s just travelling. He’s on the road all the time?.?.?.?He’s maniacally promoting himself.”
For Shashi Tharoor, a Congress leader who has surprised his own party by actively supporting some of Mr Modi’s less controversial programmes (Clean India, for example), the prime minister has simply failed to deliver solutions to the problems of corruption and bureaucracy that he has correctly diagnosed.
“Here is a man who made quite a fetish of good governance — and we see so little of it,” said Mr Tharoor. “Everything he’s said about what’s wrong remains wrong.”
Mr Modi and his administration are far from crushed. They have more than three years to go before the next general election and an opinion poll this month for India Today magazine showed that Mr Modi remains almost twice as popular as the inexperienced and whimsical Mr Gandhi. (Mr Guha is as critical of Congress as of the BJP and says Mr Gandhi remains Mr Modi’s “greatest advantage”).
Mr Modi’s critics speculate that his silence on crucial issues — especially attacks on Muslims or liberals in the name of Indian nationalism and Hindu fundamentalism — means he condones such acts. In his youth, after all, he was an activist for the rightwing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the Organisation of National Volunteers), the BJP’s religious parent. Yet in his public speeches he has tried to focus largely on development and the economy, and apparently finds himself constrained by the RSS and the sometimes vocal fanatics in the BJP. Politicians and commentators in Delhi agree with Mr Modi that people are conspiring against him — but they think the plotters come from the rightwing faction within his own party, not from NGOs. As Mr Modi approaches the second anniversary of his election victory in May, even those supporters who reject criticism of the government’s economic performance are pleading for an overdue cabinet reshuffle and are starting to worry about its politics. “It clearly has not lost the plot on economics,” said Surjit Bhalla, chairman of Oxus Investments. “And it clearly has lost the plot on everything but economics.”
