BOOK
REVIEW
Title: India @70 MODI @3.5-Capturing India’s
Transformation Under Narendra Modi
Editors:
Bibek Debroy & Ashok Malik
Publisher:
Wisdom Tree/Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, 2017
The
Elephant Gathers Momentum With Modi As
Mahout
This book was released by the Finance Minister
Arun Jaitley at the Nehru Memorial Auditorium amongst functions to commemorate
the 3.5 year mark of the Modi Government. That the next days headlines spoke
of a former occupant of his high office
applying for a job “at eighty”, was based on an incidental quip from Jaitley,
and no fault whatsoever of this worthy collection.
It is made up of 18 essays written by that
relatively rare breed of intellectuals from the right-of-centre, in a field
generally crowded with ideological Leftists, and not just in India. It includes
amongst its line-up, think-tank functionaries, journalists, bureaucrats,
diplomats, and other Government officials.
The tone of the book is confident and upbeat
throughout. But perhaps Prime Minister Modi put the emergence of the BJP best.
It is now at centre-stage with a electoral majority for the first time in its
history, and also after 30 years nationally.
He did so, in another context, that of
Indo-American relations, by saying India was ready to get over “the hesitations
of history”.
Swapan Dasgupta, now a Rajya Sabha MP, points
out that the Modi led BJP has set about expanding its political base as of 2015.
This is borne out by the increase in vote shares creeping up towards 40% on
average, and in isolated cases, even higher than 50%, at subsequent Assembly
elections.
The engineering of it saw a new emphasis on
providing succour to the rural and urban poor, and the lower middle classes.
This was combined with unprecedented public spending on infrastructure in the
absence of much initiative from the debt-ridden private sector.
This increase in vote share, evident post demonetization,
but before the advent of GST, is seen in the clutch of five states that went to
the polls along with Uttar Pradesh.
It can well be contrasted with the share of the
principal Opposition Congress declining from some 28% at the last General Elections in
2014 (to BJP’s 31%), languishing, in some instances, into disastrous single-digits.
And Dasgupta also makes the telling point that
Modi’s new politics, ( ably aided by chief election strategist and Party
President Amit Shah), shows no compunction in hopping back and forth across the
Right-Left divide.
I will skip over the tendency of most of the writers
to dutifully cover the laundry list of achievements, natural in a commemorative
volume of this type. These gains are mostly incremental in nature, with the
exception of a vast improvement in electricity and cooking gas provision to the poor.
Much
has been done through the tweaking of various Government programmes and the
prevention of leakages. This is another hallmark of Modi economics/administration,
but then, there are the bold moves too, (Surgical strikes, hot pursuit,
standing up to China, banking the unbanked, demonetization, Benami Act,
Bankruptcy Act, GST…).
A young
and globally recognised Sanjeev Sanyal, Principal Economic Advisor to the Government
of India, author of several readable books, is proud of the recent successes of
the World Bank ranking improvement in the ease of doing business stakes, and
the Moody upgrade( first in 13 years).
He is something of a city expert from his
earlier experience in Singapore, and makes the point that India will soon become
an urban majority country “within a generation”.
This is, of course, the glide path of
emerging economies growing into developed ones. It is however a long way from
MK Gandhi’s “India lives in its villages”. But the challenges of managing an
influx to total a billion city folk will be considerable.
Sanyal suggests that India will have to
considerably pick up its game on “Urban Management”. He sees urban poverty not
as static but a “dynamic flow”, and says all countries which are now much
better developed had tremendous slums in the urbanization phase. This includes
London and New York.
He suggests facilitating the rural to urban
migration process, and encouraging the dynamism that slums with “shops, mini-factories,
people moving in and out,” typify, at once bringing up visions of the Dharavi
Slums in Mumbai, amongst the biggest in Asia. This means, keeping the organism
alive and thriving through the transition, and much more than providing a roof
over the migrant’s head with “low-cost housing”.
The essays
on Health, Water, Sustainable Development, Tax Reform, while well laid out and
argued, leave one less enthused, because most members of the general public can’t
see any improvements visible on the ground. Ditto the much-publicized flop of
the Swachh Bharat Mission, against a rising tide of filth, sewage, garbage and
pollution. And the less said about the “Minimum Government Maximum Governance”
slogan, probably the better. The Ministry of Defence remains a Tower of Babel
where things are forever expected to happen but don’t.
The chapter on ASEAN and South East Asia by PM
Heblikar is interesting because of the 11 heads of Government from the region
slated to grace our Republic Day parade in January 2018. This, soon after Modi’s
own visit to meet all of them at the Manila Summit recently. India’s attitude
to South East Asia has been ambivalent and luke-warm for too long, despite
policy professions of “Act East”. The efforts being made now for a better
political and economic engagement with the region promise to yield good
dividends.
Anirban Ganguly of SPMRF flags Modi’s desire to
create a “New India”, a self-renewal, driven by: “ innovation, hard-work and
creativity”.
Diplomat Veena Sikri highlights the remarkable
rise in India’s “soft power” under Modi’s determined engagement with the
countries of the world, some visited by an Indian Prime Minister after decades,
some for the very first time.
Recent opinion polls show that the masses of
India as well as the urban elite still repose great faith in Modi’s leadership,
at a time when the “honeymoon period” is long over. And this by itself is the main
message at the end of more than 3.5 years of the Modi Government.
For:
The Sunday Pioneer BOOKS
(983
words)
November
19th, 2017
Gautam
Mukherjee
No comments:
Post a Comment