BENGALURU: It will be a stable NDA government headed by a Prime Minister who has a passionate commitment to making India the third largest economy in the world by 2029.
2024 is not a good year for ruling parties to face a national election. In the United States, President Joe Biden trails Donald Trump in several polls, while UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appears headed for disastrous losses by the Conservative Party at the hands of the Labour Party. There has been much commentary about how the BJP lost more than 60 Lok Sabha seats during the 2024 elections. However, the NDA has returned to power, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to begin a third term in office within hours, a repeat performance unlikely to be replicated by Sunak or possibly Biden. Given the reformist credentials of key allies such as Chandrababu Naidu, the odds favour a vigorous push towards the reforms needed for double digit growth during Modi 3.0. Double digit growth is a better vote catcher than any other. Unless India maintains a double digit growth path throughout Modi 3.0, youth unemployment will rise and so will the risk of unrest instigated by outside elements, a fact that Prime Minister Modi has begun working to address.
The entire term of Modi 2.0 was marked by turbulence caused mainly by external crises.
2019 onwards, the world entered a period of extreme turbulence. That was when Covid-19 first struck in Wuhan, although the information was suppressed by the Chinese government until it had become too obvious to ignore by January 2020 that a new virus was spreading. Unlike the 2003 SARS outbreak, which was swiftly made public by President Hu Jintao and had minimal casualties, the 2019 SARS-Cov-2 outbreak was mishandled disastrously by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping, who was the originator of the Total Lockdown policy, that was first imposed in and around Wuhan. Soon, lockdowns were enforced across the world. Vaccine research and production were fast-tracked, with India emerging as the biggest supplier of vaccines to the Global South.
The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in severe economic losses and dislocation of hundreds of millions of lives, as well as disruption and often stoppage of services and movement of people and products across the world. Just when the world was recovering from the effects of the pandemic, on 24 February 2022, a war between Russia and Ukraine started. Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia that harmed both themselves and the rest of the world. Much of Europe cut itself off from Russian natural resources, thereby affecting the ability of European countries, including Germany, to compete with substitutes produced by the PRC, which ignored western pleas to desist from helping Russia. Discounted oil and gas from Russia gave a boost to economic prospects in China, a country which has lost international investor confidence because of the aggressive manner in which Xi Jinping is seeking to expand PRC control across the Indo-Pacific. A year later, in 2023, Hamas launched a mass terror attack on Israel that ignited a war between itself and the Israeli Defense Forces that has destabilised the region. Given such headwinds, it ought to be a matter for satisfaction for the BJP that the party emerged with 240 Lok Sabha seats, thereby ensuring that the BJP is the party best prepared to lead a stable coalition government in the incoming Lok Sabha.
Prime Minister Modi declared to NDA MPs that there needed to be “competitive cooperation” among the states. Parties ruling those states that perform better would do much better at the hustings than those who perform poorly. In Andhra Pradesh, incoming Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu promised a high growth path, while Jagan Mohan Reddy promised freebies that came at the expense of development. It was Naidu and not Jagan that Andhra voters chose. Nationally, the I.N.D.I Alliance promised a government job to every youth, while being silent about how such a promise could be met, given that it is from taxes collected from private individuals and enterprises that government jobs are funded. Claims were made by the Opposition that the BJP was opposed to reservations for Dalits and OBCs, claims that were based on the intemperate and unauthorised statements of a few BJP members. Such remarks were swiftly disseminated across the country by the I.N.D.I Alliance as representing not the view of an individual but that of the Modi government. It helped the Opposition that such vote killing remarks remained uncontroverted by the BJP itself. Ignoring such barbs proved costly in terms of seats lost, as did the breakup of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and the split with the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu, a parting caused by remarks of some BJP state leaders directed against AIADMK icons M.G. Ramachandran and J. Jayalalithaa. Something went very wrong for the BJP in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, but what that was remains unclear at present. Despite such problems, finally it was the BJP that emerged as the single largest party, with more seats than the entire I.N.D.I Alliance. As a consequence, 2024-29 will feature not a UPA-III but a Modi 3.0 government. A stable NDA government headed by a Prime Minister who has a passionate commitment to making India the third largest economy in the world by 2029.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown throughout his life that he is capable of handling shocks and setbacks. In a way, the 2024 verdict was a blessing, in that greater power to take decisions will be given to lower levels. Before Xi Jinping centralised administrative power within the Office of the General Secretary of the CCP, the Mayor of Chinese cities such as Shanghai had power in taking decisions, so that there was no need to await Beijing’s assent. Such devolution was constantly monitored for results by the central leadership, and ensured that China grew into the second largest economy in the world. That high pace has considerably slowed by Xi’s over-centralisation. Added to that was the paralysis in decision making at lower levels that frequent use of harsh methods on officials resulted in. During Modi 3.0, India has the potential to have growth rates such as were seen in China during the Deng era. It was for his determination that growth in India should be speeded up that this columnist called then Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi India’s answer to Deng Xiaoping in The Sunday Guardian in 2013. The expectation is that during 2024-29, under Prime Minister Modi, India would enter into a sustained period of double digit growth. During the next five years, navigating crises and critics, the NDA needs to power the way to a Swarnim Bharat. Just such a transformation was called the Modi dream in his 2014 book on Modi by Vijay Nahar. Over the next five years, such a dream of Prime Minister Narendra Mod needs to become a reality.