The book, ‘Indian Renaissance: The Modi Decade’, edited by Aishwarya Pandit has essays from 26 people and a Foreword by Nirmala Sitharaman, the country’s Finance Minister.
BENGLURU: Between 1989 and 1998, India saw five general elections and six Prime Ministers. In the 20 years from 2004 to 2024, India saw two coalitions govern in ten-year stints each. While the UPA coalition was led by the Congress party, but which didn’t have a majority in the Lok Sabha, from 2014 to 2024 the NDA was led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which commanded an absolute majority in both terms. It was led by Narendra Modi, who was the undisputed leader of the party, unlike the UPA’s Manmohan Singh, who was described by Sanjaya Baru as an “accidental prime minister”. Ten years is a long enough period to take a pause and do a retrospective of sorts. The book, “Indian Renaissance: The Modi Decade”, edited by Aishwarya Pandit from the Jindal Global Law School, attempts to do just that, with essays from 26 people, an Introduction by Aishwarya Pandit, and a Foreword by Nirmala Sitharaman, the country’s Finance Minister.
The first essay is by Tony Abbott, Australia’s 28th Prime Minister from 2013-2015, and rightly points out that the global future’s luminescence will be determined by India’s choosing to participate in world events beyond the border, or not. In an admission that is a rarity for western leaders, he points out the absurdity of India being free despite its poverty and yet ranking “well down the global democracy lists. … Sadly, faith in God and country is pretty rare in Western think thanks, which is why they often find India’s democracy easier to caricature than to understand.”
Avatans Kumar’s essay is civilizational in scope. It highlights a very important change in the Indian mindset that has emerged in the 10 years from 2014—from being mired in what Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul called “full of piestic Gandhian gloom” in the 1970s, to what Prof Subhash Kak calls the “abandonment of the old apologetic tone when speaking about [Indian] culture” is an unmistakable change in the last 10 years.
In June 2016, there were zero UPI transactions. In October 2024, UPI transactions crossed 16 billion, aggregating Rs 23.5 trillion. To put that in perspective, there were more than 6,000 transactions every second of every minute, hour, day, and week of October. From coconut vendors by the highway and in mofussil towns to high-end stores in upscale malls sporting the now ubiquitous QR code, India has sped along its way to becoming a cashless society. That a Harvard Business School-educated politician, who was Finance Minister under the UPA government for more than six years, had mocked the practicality of digital transactions speaks volumes about both the disconnect the previous administration had about the potential of technology as well as the impoverishment of its vision.
Worse was the number of 50%—that is how many Indian households had access to a household toilet till 2014. This was not considered a national shame. Nor was it ever considered a national priority. That by 2024 this number had reached 100% stands out as an outstanding achievement of the Modi government.
Ashish Chauhan’s essay stands out for its focus on figures and statistics on not only the government’s schemes, the growth of its financial markets, the expanding reach of credit to small businesses, but also the emergence of a new phenomenon in India’s IT revolution—the growth of Global Capability Centers (GCC), which represent an evolution from India being a call-centre backwater to a driver of product innovation for companies.
Madhav Nalapat’s essay is rightly trenchant in its criticism of the Right to Education (RTE) Act enacted by the UPA government that made religious discrimination a foundational pillar of its drive to ostensibly provide universal education.
That it has not been corrected in over 10 years of the Modi tenure stands as a stark failure. Nalapat is not quite on the ball when he writes that “during the Modi decade… [T]here is no discrimination between those professing different faiths in these schemes.” Many schemes have been documented by vigilant observers that are open only to minority communities and which exclude Hindus. Nalapat laments the fact that India’s history as taught in schools and as scribed in its history textbooks devotes 90% of its space to the last 10% of its five-thousand-year history. Despite a steady stream of criticisms of this bias, history textbooks were unchanged for 10 years.
Foreign writers focus more than Indian essayists in this book on India’s potential to expand its reach beyond the subcontinent, driven partly by the recognition of an emergent economic powerhouse inevitably influencing developments on a global scale. Part of the motivation is also to see a counterbalance to the emergence and increasing economic domination by the newest superpower, China.
Scot Faulkner is one of several essayists who call out the rise of Chinese imperialism in the garb of economic interventions and its much-touted Belt and Road Initiative. He sees the Chinese model as one that “take[s] over a natural resource such as a mine, take over the port for shipping the resources, and build rail and road links between them. Chinese workers run everything.” This has allowed China to plant its footprint throughout Africa.
Grant Newsham is on the money when he writes that China made it “easy” to be “friends” with. “India was just too hard.” Part of it was because of a socialist mentality that pervaded both its political and bureaucratic class; part was a lingering suspicion of the US’ true intentions on account of its role in supporting Pakistan during the 1971 conflict and even later. What changed? In one word—PRC (People’s Republic of China). The US administration still finds it difficult to look at India as a potential friendly partner. In a jibe at the atmosphere of radical alt-left activism that has permeated every slice of American society and polity, Grant writes that the “US tends to treat its friends this way. Especially if they aren’t ‘woke’ enough.” Matters are different with China, where the wait time in Shanghai for a student visa interview is seven days; it is 540 days in Mumbai.
Saturo Nagao-san’s essay stands out for its focus on the deepening Indo-Japanese bond, cemented by a personal friendship between Narendra Modi and the former Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe. He also harks back to history and the Chola Empire to make the case, citing Mahan’s work, that India could also be a sea power. Indeed, with a 7,517 km long coastline, it would be surprising if it weren’t. Blue water naval ambitions would also put it in direct conflict with an already ascendant superpower—again, China.
The last word has not been said on the continuing rule of the BJP and its leader, Narendra Modi, both now in their third successive term at the Centre. Far from it. There will be a steady stream of both laudatory paeans and vitriolic screeds that will seek to inform, or not, readers over the coming years. It may take a few decades before a complete and impassive, and hopefully impartial, assessment can be made of the prime ministerial tenure of Narendra Modi and of India during that period. Till such time, books as this one will serve as useful interim milestones.
* Disclaimer: views expressed are personal.