The greatest achievement of Prime Minister Modi has been the liberation of India— liberation of India from hunger. Equally important is the emancipation and empowerment of the poor, says M.J. Akbar in a conversation with The Sunday Guardian.
Former Minister of State for External Affairs, historian and journalist, M.J. Akbar spoke to The Sunday Guardian on Prime Minister Narendra Modi surpassing Jawaharlal Nehru’s record as the longest serving elected Prime Minister of India, on June 10 2026, with 4,399 days in office. One of M.J. Akbar’s books is “Nehru: The Making of India” (1988). Here are the edited excerpts from the interview:
Q: Are we witnessing a transition from Nehru’s India to Modi’s Bharat? As a historian, how do you see this transition?
A: That is an artificial distance between India and Bharat, for the opening sentence of the Constitution says: “India, that is Bharat.”
So both terms are very much part of the identity and idea of India. And Bharat resonates with the ancient name of our country. While India/Hind is a word that derives from rather more recent history, which means about the last 1,200 years or so. When the Persians termed the land across the Indus as the land of Hind, from there emerged Hindu, and from there Hindustan. So Bharat is still the ancient name. We now recognise both names as part of our identity. I do not think there is any need to see any contradiction between the two.
Q: Would you say there has been a transition from the way Mr Nehru was looking at India or Bharat and Mr Modi’s way of looking at this nation?
A: Yes, I think there are very significant approaches to two forms of development. Jawaharlal Nehru wanted development as the first Prime Minister, but his way of looking at development was dependent too much on the theory of a leftist approach that he had learnt and picked up during his graduate days in England, and which was then strengthened by the fashionable ideology of the time—a combination of Marxism and Fabianism, which led to a complete hotch-potch in the evolution of our policy, which became neither left nor right, but which straddled in between. And then the bureaucracy turned it into a stagnant pool, with the result that the Indian economy got cramped into something that was literally immovable in the 1960s and 1970s in particular, until it was released from the trap in the 1980s and 1990s.
But let us look at it from what I consider the most significant achievement of Prime Minister Modi. If Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister at the making of India, Prime Minister Modi can be justifiably called, and will go down in history, I believe, as the architect of modern India.
One of the greatest failures of the first 30 years of our freedom—there were many successes, I do not want to decry that, Nehru had successes in the formation of national policies, the meaning of independence—but one of the great failures up to the 1970s and even the 1980s was the inability to feed our country. It is one of the most shocking facts. We associate famine with the British, which is true. The British created famine in order to fatten the pockets of the East India Company, and famine remained a fact of life till 1943, till the end of British rule.
But while our Constitution promised—it was a miraculous Constitution, a wonderful Constitution that gave us freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of faith… but it did not give us freedom from hunger.
And it might shock people to know that when we first entered journalism in the 1970s, in the Illustrated Weekly, I was doing cover stories on famine in 1971, 1972. In the 1960s, the Americans humiliated us virtually when they sent aid as part of PL-480. And we as a nation accepted it—it was a humiliation, because we had not…
There were many economies in 1947 which were far worse than ours. Japan was smashed. Countries like Korea and China were literally levelled and razed by internal wars. We had our sufferings, of course, but we did not (do anything about eradicating hunger).
The greatest achievement of Prime Minister Modi in these years has been the liberation of India—liberation of India from hunger. But equally important is the emancipation and empowerment of the poor. He empowered the poor in ways that were unthinkable in 2014. He empowered, he trusted the poor with technology when technology was considered the preserve of the educated and the middle classes, when nobody associated technology with the poor.
I remember the opposition parties—and I feel very strongly about it, that anger of mine has not gone away—when PM Modi promised banking, when he promised technology and such systems to the poor, when he introduced technology at the basic level, the opposition said opening bank accounts for the poor who had no money. Those laughs and screaming and screeching on television were led by opposition leaders who are still around.
Look at what has happened—the liberation of women and empowering them, giving them means of self-employment. I was born in a mohalla called Telinipara in West Bengal. We ourselves were not poor. I should not romanticise this element. But we lived in a street in which the workers ate rice with water—they had no money for daal.
Today, for the first time in the history of our nation, for the first time, every single mother in India sleeps at night knowing that her child has had a meal.
For those who do not understand it, this transformation will remain inexplicable. I find very often even serious people say: “Oh, but look at the cost of these welfare schemes.” They do not realise that food is a fundamental right in a civilised society. There is no cost which can be ever put to the elimination of hunger. And now the World Bank has recognised this.
When our freedom started, 78% of India was living under harsh poverty. But now for the first time, last year, the World Bank issued statistics according to which only 1.5% of Indians are considered to be living in deep poverty.
That is a revolution.
If you want to compare this even with the recent past, I remember in the previous government, just before Prime Minister Modi took over, there was a great debate, maybe in 2011 or thereabouts. A very prominent World Bank type pontificator then in government, said: “Rs 32 per day is enough.” For a family of four, Rs 900 a month was enough? I remember writing at the time that each blade of grass in his bungalow was probably worth more than Rs 32.
That was the kind of contempt we had for the poor.
Prime Minister Modi made freedom from hunger, made sanitation, made shelter, made the well-being of the poor, fundamental rights. These are historic achievements. The welfare of India begins with the welfare of the poor. There is still a long way to go. There is still an enormous amount to do.
But within these 12 years, so much has been done. When history is written properly, this will definitely be recognised.
The second thing that will be recognised is that he understands the health of the nation: that the well-being and the security of the nation can only come about when both arms are strong. We cannot have one arm which is weak. The two arms are security and the military.
It was famously said of the defence minister before Prime Minister Modi took over that not a single file had been signed in 10 years. That was maybe not a purely apocryphal story. There was some merit in that story.
And today for the first time we have added to our military strength which has not only built a security perimeter in the west and in the north—Pakistan and China—but it has also taken our security perimeter from the Hormuz—literally from Aden—right up to Malacca.
And the building of a naval security and sea security in the Andamans and in Nicobar is what will be recognised, too, as one of his significant achievements of modern India. And the strategic repositioning of India as a power of the seas.
India has always been seen as a land south of the mountains. Under Prime Minister Modi, it has also become a land north of the waters.
Q: PM Jawaharlal Nehru onwards, we have had this policy of non-alignment. Now we are talking about multi-alignment. How exactly has foreign policy changed over the years, specifically under PM Modi?
A: Prime Minister Nehru should be given special credit for understanding one thing: that freedom and independence are not the same. Many countries have freedom; they do not have independence. We do not need to stress that there are neighbours who do not understand the difference. In fact, they surrendered their freedom and they surrendered their independence in order to protect some notion of freedom, which is really freedom of the ruling class.
But from the beginning, our policy of non-alignment understood that if you do not protect and project your independence, then your freedom will be at the mercy of some superpowers.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s great mistake was that he did not back up ideological independence and a commitment of policy to independence. Independence cannot be protected only by words. Independence has to be protected by defence capability, by security capability. And that, I am afraid, Jawaharlal Nehru lost sight of, including with the bad advice that was given by defence ministers like Krishna Menon. That led to the great catastrophe which destroyed Jawaharlal Nehru’s prime ministership, and that was the catastrophe of the Chinese war in October-November 1962.
But Prime Minister Modi, even in his early days, when he was challenged by the Chinese, the way in which he stood firm…because he was rapidly building up defence capability, and any insider will tell you that the change has been phenomenal. The change in our capability has been phenomenal.
Of course, security is a continuing challenge. You cannot pause the security build-up. But this is a second and a very important achievement.
I often say that you do not have to exercise independence from enemies. Very often, you have to exercise independence from friends, when friends expect you to become, not partners, but obeisant in the name of friendship. And that is why when Prime Minister Modi stood up to President Trump on the tariffs, it was another important and a very vital moment in telling the world that India would always be ready to be a friend of every country. We are not enemies of any country, but never at the cost of our independence, never at the cost of our national interests, never at the cost of what we consider to be the primary objective of policy, which is the advancement of the interests of the Indian people.
We are in the age of the nation-state. We believe today in mutually beneficial nationalism. We become a benevolent power in our relationship with the rest of the world. We have no wish to attack anyone. We have never attacked anyone. We have been victims of aggression for a long time.
Our defence is what it is, which means a defensive defence. It is not offensive one.
The rise of India as a major benevolent power—but a benevolent power which indeed is muscular in the defence of its interests, is a very major foreign policy achievement of Prime Minister Modi.
Q: In one sentence, how would you describe the last 12 years Prime Minister Modi’s governance?
A: The last 12 years are the first 12 years of modern India.
* Joyeeta Basu is the Editor of The Sunday Guardian.
