By R.C. Rajamani
The month of May marks the completion of one year of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP-led NDA government. Installed amid unprecedented euphoria on May 26 last year, Modi’s was the first single party majority government after Rajiv Gandhi’s two thirds majority Congress regime in 1984-89. Of course, the present government is a coalition one with the Akalis and Shiv Sena, though BJP has majority on its own.
The official machinery has already begun churning out data to announce the achievements of the government the past year. Historically, official data hides more than what it reveals. It is not that nothing has been achieved. A reality check is needed to tell the government where it actually stands and where and how it is ought to proceed from here.
First, the country’s voters, especially the poor millions, expected the prices of essential articles, particularly food items, to come down as promised during poll campaign. They have not. Instead the prices have gone up. Vegetables have become beyond the reach of the poor and the lower middle class. The rate of price rise at the whole sale level may have decreased but the actual prices have not. The consumer price index shows up the ground reality. There is no point in tom-toming that the WPI inflation has come down.
Second, the reforms process has hit a road block. Key bills are still stuck in parliament for want of government majority in the Rajya Sabha. The play of stock markets show the erratic behavior of foreign investors leading to the index going up one day and plummeting another day. The rupee also is depreciating gradually. So much so, it has led to jokes by the Congress that whose age is it chasing now. It’s a tit for tat for Modi’s pre-poll barb that the rupee was chasing the 70 plus age of the then PM Dr Manmohan Singh. Of course, these were part of political levity. The serious aspect of the joke is that rupee is once again losing its strength – not a good development for the health of the economy.
Official circles would, of course, point to rating agency Moody’s forecast that India’s growth will be higher than its peers over the medium-term; and it will improve its “macro-economic, infrastructural institutional profile”. IMF and the World Bank have predicted the Indian growth at 7.5 per cent will be better than China’s this year and still better in 2016. These assessments may provide a psychological boost to the government, faced as it is, with the public perception of the widening gap between its poll promises and performance. The perception is gradually getting sharper which could well lead to public anger – not a good development for the government with a few assembly elections coming up in the next few months.
The Modi government seems lost in the euphoria of the PMN’s latest successful high- profile visits to France, Germany and Canada and prompt well-coordinated disaster management response to severe earthquake-hit Nepal and parts of India. He is soon to make another high profile and historic visit to China, Korea and Mongolia.
The farmers’ issue is bound to remain a thorn in the flesh of Modi regime. The Congress and the Aam Admi Party are applying daily pressure on the government on the issue. There has been no clear cut initiative by the government to mitigate the pain of farmers, hard hit by the pre-summer’s unseasonal rains and hailstorms.
The amending land Bill has widespread support from corporate India that needs land at low price for building their factories, but is certainly widely unpopular among the peasantry whose basic source of livelihood is going to be at the mercy of businessmen and bureaucrats. Modi has asked his party MPs to go to their constituency and explain to the people, farmers in particular, that the new land law will improve their position. There are reports, however, that a large section of BJP MPs are themselves not very enthusiastic about it, since the feedback they get is disappointing.
Business India has belied the most important expectation of the government that it will come forward to make investment which they have not been doing for quite some time. Now, one year since Modi took over, no private investment worth the name has come. The expected spurt in enthusiasm among investors is not just happening. The stock market has started showing a downward trend. Foreign institutional investors (FII) started selling.
Perhaps lost in the elation of his successful foreign trips and high marks received from rating agencies and IMF-World Bank as well as the foreign media, typified by Time magazine cover story, Mod appears to have lost touch with his original constituency – rural India. He should be aware that rural India can deliver retributive punishment as it had done to Chandrababu Naidu, the IT icon of yore, some years ago in Andhra Pradesh.
At the urban level, Modi’s image is getting dented due to his style of functioning. Here again the perception matters more than reality perhaps. Somehow, he has given the impression that he is at the centre of everything. This is not a done thing in the parliamentary system of governance. Under the cabinet system, it is essentially a collective responsibility and the PM is first among equals. Critics have described the present dispensation as one revolving round just a single individual.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, once thought to be soft on Modi, has this to say: “It is PMO all the way.This government is much more paralysed now than in the alleged days of policy paralysis under the UPA. Everything is now controlled by the PMO. No one moves without an ok from PMO. Every file gets stuck in the PMO. There is a real worry about how much is going to get done”, the former UN Under Secretary General told an elite audience at a World Bank event in Washington recently.
As it comes close to completing one year in power, the Modi government, hitherto free from even a scent of corruption, faces a challenge on this count as the Opposition in Parliament has begun demanding the resignation of road transport minister Nitin Gadkari in light of CAG’s censure of Purti group for failing to repay the loan it took from a government agency.
The Congress has accused BJP of adopting double standards, saying the party disrupted Parliament on the basis of leaked CAG reports, but now its yardstick about corruption and transparency has changed. “Here is a case involving something for which he (Gadkari) had to resign as BJP President in past. This is a CAG report against a company he was heading. Having been indicted he cannot continue as a minister,” the party contended in parliament.
Perhaps the severest blow to Modi government has come from within. Arun Shourie, disinvestment minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government has taken on Modi and his key men like Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for running a government that had “failed to perform on most fronts, with the exception of foreign policy.”
Shourie, a highly respected voice in political circles, has said the gap between the government’s projection and performance had become too vast. He said the “trimurti” (triumvirate) of Modi, Jaitley and BJP president Amit Shah worked as a team to run the government and the party but it wasn’t getting feedback, as it had “frightened” not only allies but their own people, too.
All these indicators point to a grim situation that the Modi government is faced with. The important thing for the government is to realize the situation and not to get lost in a worked up environment of everything being honky dory. It is time that the government is shaken out of its reverie and made to see grim domestic ground realities. Modi has aroused high hopes which are already subjected to the law of diminishing return. Ordinary people are already disillusioned with the promise of ‘acchhe din’. Before the Lok Sabha poll last summer, Modi was the darling of millions of young voters thanks to his promise of Change in terms of responsive and good governance, generation of jobs, better living, healthcare and modern educational facilities. Modi must reflect on the past one year and honestly assess his own performance. He has four more years to make amends. (IFS)