This e-book is a compilation of The Hindu’s series of articles on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s completion of one year in power.

Contents No acche din for higher education ................................................................ 3

Modi and his Chakravyuh ............................................................................. 7

The republic without a language .................................................................. 11

When the traveller returns ......................................................................... 14

The strategy behind the inaction ................................................................. 18

Ghar ghar Modi, Bharat bhar Modi ............................................................. 20

‘States unlikely to bridge gap in funding’ .................................................... 22

A strong show amid varied challenges ........................................................ 25

There is a palpable sense of hope and confidence ....................................... 27

The one-man show ..................................................................................... 29

Will Modi trot or knot? ............................................................................... 32

Year 1: Still Waiting for Acche Din? ............................................................ 34

An education in acronyms .......................................................................... 36

Modi should learn from the Chinese their deliberate rejection of self-

promotion ..................................................................................................40

Regressive phase ........................................................................................ 44

A year of hope ............................................................................................ 47

Promises unmet ......................................................................................... 50

Pushing the envelope in foreign policy ........................................................ 53

Best poised to deliver results ...................................................................... 57

Editorial: That missing vigour ....................................................................60

Decisive but to what avail? .......................................................................... 61

Editorial: Not up to expectations... ............................................................. 65

Editorial: … yet successful abroad ............................................................. 66

No acche din for higher education

ZOYA HASAN

Besides cuts in state funding which is a critical area of concern, the BJP-led government’s overall approach to education is destructive of autonomy, creativity and diversity.

Not a single Indian institution of higher learning figures in the

list of top 200 universities prepared by The Times Higher

Education Supplement. These dismal rankings are quite often

taken as a measure of the crisis of higher education in India,

notwithstanding the obvious limitations of the ranking exercise.

But all is not well with Indian universities.

So far, the Narendra Modi government has done very little to address the crisis in higher

education. The government started on a controversial note. Prime Minister Modi’s

selection to head the Ministry of Human Resources and Development (HRD) raised

questions about the importance of education under this dispensation as it showed scant

regard for education in spite of the fact that the Sangh Parivar takes education very

seriously.

Lower budgetary allocation

The government’s first Budget has not delivered achhe din for higher education in the

country. The Union Budget for 2015-16 has reduced funds for higher education to the

tune of Rs.3,900 crore in its revised budget estimates for the financial year 2014-15. The

government has revised the figure to Rs.13,000 crore, as against Rs.16,900 crore for the

plan allocation. The overall education budget of the Modi government is down from

Rs.82,771 crore to Rs.69,074 crore. The government has also revised allocation for the

Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) — which is a Centrally Sponsored Scheme

(CSS), launched in 2013 that aims at providing strategic funding to eligible state higher

educational institutions — to Rs.397 crore as against Rs.2,200 crore in the original

Budget.

Despite the trend of passing on the responsibility of education to the private sector, there

is a strong case to expand state funding of education. The role of publicly funded

education in the democratisation of access to higher education in India is indisputable.

Treating the higher education system as a public good, the Indian state has been

successful in providing access to institutions of higher learning to many groups which

were hitherto not able to access it. This is only possible if there is adequate state funding

and public regulation for the entire system of education from school to university. Far

from expanding publicly funded universities with an increase in budgetary allocation of

education, state funding is being steadily withdrawn from education in general and

higher education in particular so that private capital, both Indian and foreign, can be

encouraged. The privatisation of higher education is now an irreversible trend in India,

where a majority of the institutions have been established by the private sector. In the

midst of this trend, it is the arts and humanities that are being pushed aside.

Move towards centralisation

Besides cuts in state funding which is a critical area of concern, the Bharatiya Janata

Party (BJP)-led government’s overall approach to education is destructive of autonomy,

creativity and diversity. The manner in which the state is intervening in higher education

is causing concern among both teachers and students. There are alarming proposals to

change the very nature of higher education. The most disturbing is the proposal to revive

the Central Universities Act of 2009 which will require the Central universities to follow a

common admission procedure and common syllabus. Even though the United

Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime and the current National Democratic Alliance (NDA)

government have been remarkably similar in their desire to introduce changes in the

higher education system, most of the UPA’s major proposals got drowned in the

Parliament logjam which continued till the last session of the 15th Lok Sabha. Also, there

was some debate and opposition within the UPA government which could be another

reason why the government couldn’t implement its agenda. This government is pursuing

the reform agenda much more aggressively leaving little scope for dissent and

disagreement.

The Central University (CU) Act seeks to replace the existing Central universities with

one single Act which would require all universities to follow a “common” admission and

“common” syllabus along with “transferable” faculty. India’s higher education system,

serving a large and heterogeneous population, should ideally support a diverse and

decentralised system. However, the CU Act will do the opposite; it aims at centralisation

and homogenisation, ignoring the specificities and uniqueness of each university. Each

University’s Act has a specific context and mandate, and each has developed its own

pattern of knowledge production and reproduction. For example, the Delhi University Act

(1922) was in response to the need to provide for the educational needs of an emerging

India and incorporates a wide college network. The founding ideas of the Jawaharlal

Nehru University, on the other hand are quite different from other institutions. The

impulse for the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Act (1966) was to institutionalise the

values and vision of “national integration, scientific temper, and humanism”. These Acts

have shaped their curriculum, academic ethos, teaching and research. Nullifying these

Acts would be a blow against diversity and pluralism as well as to minimum autonomy

without which a university cannot function and flourish. It will narrow the space for

innovation and create a teaching culture where creativity and critical thinking will be

curbed.

No academic logic

The Ministry of HRD’s idea of “reform” is an egregious attempt to standardise higher

education and research by introducing a common framework for Central universities

based on the myth that uniformity will equalise quality and skills across universities. It is

not at all clear that uniformity will help in upgrading new universities or the State

universities, which is the ostensible aim of this exercise.

Some of the good universities such as JNU or the Ambedkar University, Delhi, are

successful precisely because they value heterogeneity and variation so that creativity and

innovation can thrive. Many Central universities reflect India’s extraordinary diversity in

their faculty composition and student body, and, above all, they offer very different

syllabi and courses which has helped in their academic growth. The CU Act advocates

transfer of faculty between universities. Nowhere in the world are “transfers” between

institutions practised. There is no academic logic here. Besides, transfers increase the

possibility of vindictiveness as it can be used as a punitive measure to silence dissent and

independent voices.

It is evident that the government is eager to control and direct universities both at the

Central and State level. For this the HRD Minister is pushing the idea of a Choice-Based

Credit System (CBCS), first mooted by her predecessor, Murli Manohar Joshi, during the

term of NDA-I, which would have a serious impact on the country’s education system.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has formulated the new proposals for a CBCS,

a common entrance test and a central ranking system ignoring the assurances given by

the government and the UGC that it would hold wide consultations with all stakeholders

before undertaking any subsequent educational reforms. A common syllabus is neither

desirable nor feasible as this will diminish creativity and lower standards in order to

conform to common standards. We need a university system that encourages diversity

and decentralisation, not one that centralises authority or enforces lifeless uniformity.

Even as the government has set the ball rolling for unveiling a new national education

policy, there is no public debate or consultation at the behest of the Ministry. Major

changes are being initiated and pushed without actually consulting the professionals

involved even though there is growing unease and opposition within Central universities

to the new education policy and the manner in which the exercise is being done. So far,

the MHRD’s consultations have been limited to posting information and asking people to

post comments and filling out a mygov.in survey on higher education on the Ministry’s

website. The public was given a period of one month for responding to the “major

reforms”. Would any half-serious attempt at reform of the education system treat such

momentous changes in this manner?

The right-wing agenda

The common syllabi system has to be seen in the context of attempts to saffronise the

education sector, particularly at a time when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is

spearheading the agenda of the present government. Even though the right-wing

intelligentsia has failed to provide a credible account of India’s past and present, the

Sangh Parivar is nevertheless busy reorganising educational syllabi to reflect a view of

history and society gleaned from mythology and religious texts, in effect giving an open

licence to fantasise history. Within weeks of forming the government, the RSS held a

meeting with the HRD Minister where it pushed for introduction of moral education,

correcting distorted history being taught in educational institutions and giving proper

representation to forgotten idols of the country from the pre- and post-Independence era.

RSS ideologue, Dinanath Batra, unambiguously stated this: Political change has taken

place, now there should be total revamp of education. Activists of Batra’s Shiksha Bachao

Andolan are reportedly firming up recommendations for a revamp of education; they

believe the formal education system needs some key changes: a greater emphasis on

Indian knowledge traditions and a blending of the material and the spiritual in the

curriculum.

Leaders of the BJP are on record announcing their intention to change the textbooks and

syllabus. The larger Sangh agenda includes substantive changes both in the content of

education and appointments in prestigious institutions. Their aim is to influence their

working to reflect the Sangh’s agenda by making key appointments of persons belonging

to the RSS and affiliate bodies in various institutions like the Indian Council of Historical

Research (ICHR), the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), the Nehru

Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Central

universities, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and

the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), etc, who will loyally

execute such changes. Many of them will exercise influence on public policy, and will do

so not due to their scholarship, but due to their proximity to the RSS.

(Zoya Hasan, formerly Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, is ICSSR National

Fellow, Council for Social Development, New Delhi.)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 20, 2015

Modi and his Chakravyuh

PETER RONALD DESOUZA

The Chakravyuh in the Mahabharata was a seven-ringed, impenetrable battle formation. In his first year, the Prime Minister has successfully broken through two circles. But there are five more to go.

Abhimanyu was in Shubhadra’s womb when he heard Lord

Krishna reveal the secret of how to enter the Chakravyuha.

But he did not learn how to exit it, and that is the reason why

he was finally killed in fierce battle in the heart of the enemy’s

army. Not so Gandhiji, who triumphed over the Chakravyuh

effortlessly. Not only was he able to enter and exit it with

ease, he did so at a time and place of his choosing, dissolving

it with ahimsa and creating independent India.

Jawaharlal Nehru largely designed the Chakravyuh of the modern Indian state. Even

though not as easily as Gandhiji, he did succeed in entering and exiting it — democratic

and secular India was the consequence. Indira Gandhi got trapped in the Chakravyuh.

Like Abhimanyu, she got to the sixth circle, but was felled by the Emergency and,

becoming increasingly authoritarian and paranoid, found the circles closing around her

and she succumbed to the arrows from enemies both imagined and real.

We could continue preparing a report card for all the Prime Ministers and their

Chakravyuhas but the coming anniversary of Modi’s first year in office is an opportunity

to speculate on his chances of successfully negotiating the Chakravyuha of government.

Abhimanyu heard Krishna saying that the trick was to attack and destroy the soldiers to

the left and to the right, so that irrespective of which way the circle turned, one would be

able to enter it. The Prime Minister has attacked the politics on the Left but is not quite

decisive in his support for the economic policies of the Right. While the Left is rebelling

against his social and cultural policies, the Right is beginning to grumble that nothing has

changed on the economic front. 'Nothing is changed on the ground’ said Mr. Deepak

Parekh.

In the Mahabharata, the Chakravyuh was a seven-spiralled, impenetrable battle

formation. Let us see what the seven circles of Indian polity are.

The seven circles

At the outermost seventh circle is foreign policy. This is the country’s interface with the

world — the neighbourhood, the region, and the global political and economic order.

Here, Mr. Modi has been the most effective, gaining the attention of different

international power groups and having them compete for India’s friendship. From getting

the UN to declare International Yoga Day on June 21 to having the US President as Chief

Guest for Republic Day to establishing a BRICS development bank to land swaps with

Bangladesh, Modi has passed the first circle by neutralising the Left and ignoring the

Right. There is a distinct Nehruvian touch to his foreign policy.

The second circle too Mr. Modi has been able to penetrate. This is building a political

coalition for governance. By winning elections with a single party majority and ending the

era of compromise and coalition politics and then winning several State elections, Mr.

Modi has inaugurated a new phase of decisive national politics. Some political resistance

remains, from within his party and without, but these won’t stop him from going through

this circle.

His penchant of concentrating power in the PMO when collegial governance is required

may present difficulties during the return journey, since the feedback mechanism of

politics that is required to manage such a diverse polity will be considerably enfeebled,

but there is little doubt that Mr. Modi has built a political coalition to give domestic

politics a decisive turn. At this point of time he is limited only by his will and his

imagination.

Mr. Modi has now reached the third circle — the instruments of governance. Here, the

struggle has just begun. There are some good policies, such as the Pradhan Mantri Jan

Dhan Yojana (bank accounts), the Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana (life

insurance), the Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana (accident insurance), and the Atal

Pension Yojana (pension for the unorganised sector), but these have to be seen in tandem

with plans to reverse the social impact assessment and consent clause of the Land

Acquisition Bill, the hasty environmental clearances, and the near-zero interaction with

the media in India. Thus, some very good initiatives that are people friendly, with some

questionable decisions that are people hostile. It is unclear whether his moves to defeat

the warriors on the Left will be as successful as in earlier circles. Equally, the warriors on

the Right are voting with their feet. Corporate India is beginning to speak about a

‘directionless’ economic policy steeped in hyperbole. Mr. Modi’s magic is losing its sheen.

It is at the fourth circle — the respect for democratic and parliamentary institutions —

that Modi’s achievements begin to look thin. Ordinances are frequently resorted to. In his

fortnightly letter to Chief Ministers, Nehru wrote on 16 August 1948, “Nevertheless,

(ordinances are) a dangerous path to tread and governments get used to very special

measures which they cannot do without later. For us, with our past record in regard to

civil liberty, this is a particularly distasteful course.”

The ordinance has become Mr. Modi’s instrument of choice not just in the very visible

land acquisition issue but also with respect to his desire “to give a government job to just

one superannuated officer”. This emasculation of institutions can be seen in his returning

the Supreme Court collegium’s recommendations for elevation to the Bench of an

eminent senior advocate; in the government’s defence of Clause 66A of the IT Act, which

was mercifully struck down by the courts; or in keeping important offices such as that of

the Chief Information Commissioner vacant.

In the fourth circle, Mr. Modi is making little headway. It is too early to determine

whether he has the capability to strengthen institutions or undermine them — with early

evidence pointing to the latter tendency — but we need another year to find out.

The real test

It is in the fifth circle that Mr. Modi begins to lose his capability to determine outcomes.

This is the circle that concerns the public discourse of a plural society; the discourse

required to build a modern democratic state. Entering it requires informed intervention,

speech and actions that support and consolidate the critical temper required by the

humanist aspirations of a modern India.

By his silence, Mr. Modi has allowed the regressive elements among his supporters to

determine the terms of public discourse. When the Chairman of the Indian Council of

Historical Research says that ‘What we teach today in schools and colleges lacks both

moral and material content, which could mould character and conduct... Our history is

deprived of Bharateeyata (Indianness)’; or when the RSS chief says that Mother Teresa’s

services were governed by conversion motives, Mr. Modi has remained silent, allowing

public discourse to be dictated by a rabble-rousing minority.

If Mr. Modi gets through the five circles described above, the real test will begin in the

sixth (political philosophy) and seventh (personal ethics) circles. One cannot govern a

pluralist country like India with a philosophy crafted in a shakha. At its core must be a

commitment to secularism and social justice. Perhaps a different secularism than the

partisan one practised by the Congress, but secularism nonetheless.

A majoritarian mindset, which Mr. Modi seems comfortable with, is unfair to both the

majority and the minority in the population. What are Mr. Modi’s core beliefs? What is

his understanding of the relationship between communities? What steps does he plan for

the empowerment of women? And Adivasis? How does he see dignity achieved in a

society fissured by caste? What is his view on the rule of law even if it penalises his closest

advisors?

These are not idle questions. They constitute the sixth circle where Indira Gandhi fell.

Then, Mr. Modi will still have to face the seventh circle of personal ethics before finally

emerging triumphant.

(Peter Ronald deSouza is Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. The

views are personal.)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 20, 2015

The republic without a language

NISSIM MANNATHUKKAREN

The more we use words like ‘saviour’ or ‘super hero’, the more we lose the language of democracy and dumb down the political discourse.

To politicise the masses is not and cannot be to make a political speech. It means driving

home to the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate the fault is

theirs, and that if we progress, they too are responsible… — Frantz Fanon

The extraordinary thing about the Brazilian football legend

Sócrates was his realisation that football was not the raison

d'être in a world defined by injustice and oppression. A

qualified doctor, he showed unprecedented courage in

challenging his own nation’s military government, even while

he captained its mercurial football team. For Sócrates,

democracy and justice were primary; everything else,

secondary.

Narendra Modi came to power on May 26, 2014. Since then, these questions have been

asked incessantly: can Mr. Modi change India? Can he do what Manmohan Singh could

not? Can Mr. Modi take India to superpower status? But the critical point is this: these

questions are completely contradictory to the ethos of a democracy. It is the inability to

rise above them that is the greatest crisis in Indian politics: the lag between the formal

shell of democracy and its practice, the republic and its language.

That is why we already see ennui setting in about the Modi regime — things being the

same, and fading hopes of a new India. But how can a nation of India’s size transform

itself when people are completely divorced from the transformation?

People’s power is being systematically decimated and ceded to political rulers.

Increasingly, individual leaders are seen as agents of change — a renowned scholar saw

Mr. Modi as a potential Abraham Lincoln and a popular columnist sees him bringing

development to India if not thwarted by “Hindu fanatical organisations”. Here, Mr. Modi

the individual exists in a bubble separated from the social forces that brought him to

power.

The wrong questions

The more we pose questions from this framework of the leader as the saviour, the more

we get tendencies like the complete negation of the parliamentary system and the role of

the prime minister as simply primus inter pares or “first among equals”. Do we have

another example of a Cabinet made so redundant by the omniscient power of the Prime

Minister? If the early photo of Ministers standing like schoolchildren in front of the

Prime Minister was ominous, the brutal clipping of the wings of the foreign minister, in a

regime so focussed on making India a global power, is degrading.

If Dr. Singh’s office was rendered weak being subject to extra-constitutional authority,

Mr. Modi’s has concentrated power in itself. Ironically, the weakest and the strongest

Prime Minister have both struck at the edifice of democracy and produced a policy

paralysis. The strengthening of the executive wing of the state is not the only problem;

unprecedented attacks are being launched on the judiciary, too.

Despite these top-down moves, what is dangerous to the language of democracy is the

servility of the people themselves. The government’s confrontational attitude towards

civil society has not been resisted enough by the citizenry. A pliant media refuses to

question the government. If before only Dr. Singh was silent, today the whole government

is silent. It arrogantly believes that a republic can be built by the monologue of “Mann Ki

Baat”.

The lack of resistance is pushing democracy as monologue. The fawning NRI audiences of

Mr. Modi reinforce this, and reduce politics to superficialities. Of course, all mass and

popular politics is superficial to an extent, especially in a media-saturated culture, but

superficialities cannot devour all substance.

Witness the speech by Mr. Modi in Toronto, which was, like his other speeches abroad,

ridden with theatrical hyperbole. Complex problems like India’s waste, which have

dimensions of caste, class, technology, etc., were reduced to caricature. Unsurprisingly,

the examples he gives to show a tectonic shift in cleanliness is Sachin Tendulkar cleaning

up a street in Mumbai or two young women cleaning the ghats of Varanasi. That the

Prime Minister can pitch his speeches at this level — seemingly addressing children — is

incredulous in the Information Age. But they are met with rapturous ovation. The

problem is not created by an individual politician like Mr. Modi; it is a reflection of the

consistent infantilisation of citizens in these democracies, which have eviscerated their

power. What is more concerning than the dumbing down of political discourse is the

public’s response.

The fundamental problem is the lack of a critical mass of people’s organisations

challenging the status quo and deepening the language of democracy around substantial

issues of food, education, health and ecology. India’s great agrarian devastation is more

than two decades old but, astonishingly, the 60 per cent of the population engaged in

agriculture has not been able to generate an independent democratic movement that

could bring the nation to a standstill.

The degeneration of political parties has led to the language of superhero as saviour. The

Congress, with its nonexistent inner party democracy, is not the one that can deepen

democracy. The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh Parivar, built on a regressive

majoritarianism and now captured by a supremo culture, have always been

fundamentally against democracy.

The mainstream Left parties, which had once built deep democratic roots and

momentous people’s struggles, are now mostly a mirror image of the “bourgeois” parties.

If the phenomenal victory of the AAP showed how even a minor tinkering of the language

of democracy can enthuse the masses, its later travails show that even that can lead to

resistance and implosion from within.

Decentralising power

As writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon recognised, empowering the masses means

decentralising power: “The flow of ideas from the upper echelons to the rank and file and

vice versa must be an unwavering principle.”

When Sócrates began to campaign for democracy against the military regime in Brazil, he

started with building democracy in the lowest unit: his football club. Unless there are

democratic organisations representing every walk of life, the language of democracy

cannot be constructed.

If dynasties control parties, it is because the language of feudalism, of hierarchy and

deference, pervades all other aspects of society. The attitude of the citizens in a

democracy to their rulers should be that of Diogenes, the Greek philosopher, to Alexander

the Great. When Alexander went to meet the famous philosopher, who chose to live on

the streets in penury, he was basking in the morning sun. Alexander asked him if he could

do anything for him. Diogenes replied: “Yes. Stand out of my sunlight”!

Leaders, however illustrious, do not build democracies; people do. As Fanon put it, “the

magic lies in their hands and their hands alone”.

The destiny of 1.3 billion people cannot be left to a single individual. Vibrant people’s

struggles for democracy do exist, but are fragmented, and on the margins. They have to

coalesce into new and robust social and political formations that are interested in

building democratic language and institutions. Only then can we stop asking if the prime

minister will change the nation’s future.

(Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University, Canada. E-

mail: nmannathukkaren@dal.ca)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 20, 2015

When the traveller returns

SANJAYA BARU

If Year One was about diplomacy, Year Two has to be about the economy. The world is waiting to see what India has to offer in real terms.

At the end of a year of hectic diplomacy, Prime Minister

Narendra Modi may well have come to the same conclusion that

his predecessor Manmohan Singh did when he told the India

Today Conclave in February 2005, “The world wants India to do

well… our real challenges are at home.”

It is by ensuring that the Indian economy kept in step with an

annual rate of economic growth of over 8.0 per cent in 2003-10, creating expectations of

an India on the rise, that the government of the day was able to undertake important

diplomatic initiatives. The economic slide after 2011, and the crisis of domestic

governance that followed, brought the India Story to a grinding halt by 2012-13. A year

ago, the political consequences of that misgovernance followed. A new leader took charge.

Most comments this past week on the Modi government completing one year have made

the point that while the Prime Minister shines on foreign policy, his record at home on

political and economic management has been below par. While Mr. Modi’s foreign forays

have been impressive, both in style and substance, how the world will come to view India

in the years ahead will depend on how the Indian economy performs and the polity

managed. That Mr. Modi understands where the real challenges lie is demonstrated by

the fact that he has made national economic development the focus of his international

diplomacy.

Bilateral tripod

Nobel Prize economist Thomas C. Schelling famously observed, in a testimonial to a

United States Congressional Committee on U.S. foreign policy, way back in 1993, that

international relations is all about three things: war and the avoidance of conflict;

migration and the management of the movement of people; and trade, in its many

dimensions.

This way of viewing international relations and foreign policy enables one to quantify the

importance of bilateral relations. If the three dimensions to foreign policy are

government-to-government (G2G), people-to-people (P2P) and business-to-business

(B2B) relations, then it is possible to track relations between nations based on an analysis

of how they fare along these three tracks.

For example, India’s bilateral relationship with the U.S. would score high on all three —

G2G, P2P and B2B. The Soviet Union also used to score high on all three during the 1970s

when India had close G2G relations, the Soviet Union was an important trade partner,

and students of my generation were as willing to study in Moscow as in any other

Western capital. Russia slipped down the B2B and P2P rankings even as it has

maintained high scores on the G2G dimension.

China, after 1962, scored low on all three counts. Over the last two decades there has been

a gradual improvement of G2G relations, but it is the sharp rise in B2B interactions over

the past decade that has contributed to increased G2G and P2P relations. Given that the

India-China G2G relationship can only improve when India feels more comfortable with

China’s geopolitical stance in Asia and the resolution of the border question, Mr. Modi

seems to have decided that the border issue can wait till the B2B and P2P aspects of

India-China relations improve further and inject greater trust into the bilateral

relationship.

Since the focus of foreign policy is on a widening of the space for India’s economic

development and creating a stable regional environment to facilitate this, Mr. Modi has

extended the policy of non-reciprocal ‘unilateral liberalisation’, pursued in the past with

less developed economies in Asia and Africa, to China, offering e-visas to Chinese

tourists. Such a policy is aimed at creating mutually beneficial inter-dependencies and

constituencies for better relations.

It’s still the economy

Having surprised the world and citizens at home with his energetic and flamboyant

diplomacy, Mr. Modi would do well to turn his attention to an improved management of

the economy and domestic affairs in the months ahead. After all, the question can be

asked, why does the world want India to do well? In large part because the economic

betterment of over a billion people, as in China, presents opportunities for the rest of the

world. Which is why the proper management of the economy is the key that will open new

doors for Indian foreign policy.

Views about Mr. Modi’s management of the polity and economic policy tend to gravitate

to two extremes. His critics focus on communal polarisation, agrarian distress, tax

terrorism and the persistent unease of doing business in India. His admirers view all such

criticism as sour grapes and the frustrated rage of the marginalised elite.

The truth is that Mr. Modi’s record at home has been mixed. The economy is certainly

doing better, but things could have been even better. For reasons so far not explained, the

government wasted its first six months in office as far as economic policy and governance

reform were concerned. It paid a political price when it lost the local elections in Delhi

and a handful of by-elections elsewhere.

For all his political brilliance, Mr. Modi initially allowed himself to be portrayed as a

friend of business oligarchs, thereby curtailing his political space for policy action on the

economic front, and has subsequently tried to distance himself from this image by not

paying enough attention to improving the ‘ease of doing business’. If the ‘Make in India’

campaign had been launched instead as a ‘nation-building’ effort, like the Swachch

Bharat campaign — “Bharat Mein Banao, Bharat Ko Banao” (Make India by Making in

India) — the Prime Minister and all his economic ministers would have had wider

political space to act.

The economy needs to move back to higher rates of investment and savings and higher

levels of spending at home. This means expectations must turn decisively positive and

remain so. The opportunity to alter expectations for the better immediately after coming

to power last May was wasted. And only in 2015 has the government focussed on

governance.

Birthdays are always occasions for resolutions and renewals. If the government decides

that the coming year will be about better and inclusive governance, and about increasing

investment and business opportunities to create new jobs and better infrastructure, then

expectations can still be turned around. This also requires careful management of social

and political tensions at home. The quality of both the political and the administrative

leadership dealing with these challenges has declined. Thus, more effort is required to

translate the slogan ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ into meaningful

improvement in the quality of administration.

What the world wants

Man does not live by bread alone, nor do nations. So, it is not just the performance of the

economy that matters for India’s relations with the world, but also what India brings to

the global plate, so to speak. The international community does, by and large, celebrate

the idea of India. Successive prime ministers have used the metaphor of Vasudhaiva

Kutumbakam (The world as one family) to define India’s own identity, as a nation, and

its approach to the international community. Mr. Modi, too, has adopted this idea.

Apart from India’s economic rise, the success of its secular, liberal and plural democracy

is also desperately sought by a world divided along sectarian, ethnic, racial and religious

lines. India’s rise as a democracy, and on the basis of the inclusive concept of Vasudhaiva

Kutumbakam, has an appeal as important as the market for goods and talent that India

represents.

These impulses ought to define the agenda for the government’s second year in office.

The ruling coalition still has the advantage of numbers. The principal opposition party

remains hobbled and unable to regain momentum. The government can have no excuses,

other than its own inertia or lack of imagination, for not moving forward faster, and in a

more inclusive way.

(Sanjaya Baru is Director for Geo-Economics and Strategy, International Institute for

Strategic Studies, and Honorary Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 22, 2015

The strategy behind the inaction

DHIRAJ NAYYAR

Big bang economic reform is politically risky for the BJP, whose first priority is to replace the Congress as India’s default party.

In India, it is often argued that good economics is bad politics

and bad economics is good politics. There is a perception that

free-market reform rarely wins elections. India’s favourite

reformers Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and

Chandrababu Naidu all bit the dust at the hustings. Equally,

there is a perception that populism wins; Sonia Gandhi in

2009, Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy in 2004, the Dravidian parties

in Tamil Nadu. Narendra Modi’s historic 2014 win against

the populist United Progressive Alliance might have buried that ghost. But it likely hasn’t.

The reality is that the relationship between economic reform and political success is more

complex than simple clichés. The fact is that while on balance a greater number of people

will gain from economic reform, some will lose. And in democracies, the losers can often

command the louder voice, with some help from opportunist political parties.

An astute politician like Mr. Modi knows that. He also knows that while in Gujarat

economic reform may have translated into good politics (as seen in the repeated elections

wins), the same equation may not add up elsewhere in India. Any assessment of Mr.

Modi’s record in office must recognise this tension (often perceived and sometimes real)

between economics and politics and the fact that for Mr. Modi and the Bharatiya Janata

Party, his unique mandate isn’t just about an economic project to transform India. It is

also about a political project to grow the BJP as a political party, to install Chief Ministers

in States it has never held power in before, and to eventually replace Congress as the

default party of governance in India.

If you ask a BJP member what the high point of Mr. Modi’s first year in office was, many

would probably say the party’s twin victories in Maharashtra and Haryana in October

2014, when Devendra Fadnavis and Manohar Lal Khattar became the first-ever BJP

leaders to rule those States. The BJP (or should we say Mr.Modi and Amit Shah) had

succeeded in storming two new bastions within six months of the general election.

Reforms come second

Those expecting Mr. Modi to push ahead with radical economic reform in his first six

months (the honeymoon period) — whether on labour laws, land acquisition or even FDI

— were always going to be disappointed. Put simply, those reforms, whether necessary or

not, would have given a stick that the Opposition could wield at Mr. Modi and the BJP.

The political project demanded clear priority. The Modi wave could not be disturbed by

the logic of economic reform. Imagine the political controversy that the amendments to

the land bill would have caused in Maharashtra and Haryana, two States where a lot of

land acquisition by industry actually happens. Unsurprisingly, elements of the reform

process — on land, labour and FDI — picked up after those two elections and have, at the

least, created some political storm.

How does the defeat in Delhi in February 2015 fit into this narrative? Was that a vote

against the lack of reform and the growing disillusionment with Mr. Modi? Was it a

setback to the political project? The answer to the second question is no, because while

the defeat in Delhi was a blow to the BJP, the party retains a strong presence (it is the

second biggest party and ahead of the Congress by miles) and is well placed to capitalise

on AAP’s non-performance. The answer to the first question isn’t so obvious. It probably

was a vote that signalled impatience with a lack of outcomes, rather than a vote for or

against a particular set of policies.

More elections up ahead

Going forward, the BJP has a crucial political project coming up in Mr. Modi’s second

year in office — the Assembly election in Bihar in September-October 2015. That is

another State where the BJP hasn’t had a Chief Minister and has been in government

previously only as a junior partner in a coalition. The Modi-Shah duo will want to change

that. Now, Bihar’s electorate is probably not so bothered about FDI, land or labour

reforms because the State has very little investment and industry in any case. But Bihar’s

electorate would be greatly concerned about subsidies (particularly food and fertiliser)

and government welfare programmes, including the Congress-founded MNREGA.

The logic of economic reform requires that Modi’s government take firm steps to

rationalise subsidies (many of which are lost in corruption) and cut down unproductive

government spending on populist schemes to divert it to productive investment in

infrastructure. Again, there has been disappointment among supporters of reform on the

lack of concrete action on this front. If anything, Messrs. Mr. Modi and Mr. Jaitley have

committed more money to MNREGA than the Congress did. But repealing any major

subsidy or abolishing a populist government programme would give the Opposition in

Bihar something to beat the BJP with. Such radical reform, while good in the long term,

entails a political risk in the short run. The Opposition would go on overdrive arguing

that Mr. Modi has cut spending on the poor and that his policies are pro-rich. The BJP

government next faces an election in 2019, but the party has to battle in different States

every year. The smaller political projects must also be kept in mind.

It is perhaps peculiar to India that the country is in a continuous election cycle. After

Bihar, it will be West Bengal’s turn in 2016 — another State where the BJP wants to make

inroads. In 2017, it will be Uttar Pradesh where the BJP will want to reclaim power after

more than a decade. In 2018, its core States of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and

Rajasthan will go to the polls. When the larger political project isn’t simply to win re-

election in 2019, but also to extend the party’s reach in other States, Mr. Modi has no

honeymoon period to take what might be difficult economic decisions.

That is probably the best explanation for the chosen path of creative incrementalism on

economic policy rather than big bang reform. In Mr. Modi’s view, that may be the only

way to balance the logic of winning elections with the need to power growth. That is why,

in the BJP’s view, the first year of Mr. Modi’s government has been quite a success.

This article was published in The Hindu on May 21, 2015

Ghar ghar Modi, Bharat bhar Modi

V. N. DHOOT

Modi succeeds in building the foundation of a resurgent India, says V.N. Dhoot.

Within just 12 months of taking charge,

the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has succeeded in building

the foundation of a stronger and resurgent India. From a

mood of despair a year ago, almost every CEO is now turned

into an optimist and is busy making plans to invest more —

especially in the infrastructure and nation building sectors

such as roads, ports, defence and manufacturing.

This change in mood came mainly due to the decisive leadership of Modi and his team A.

The economy is on the right track. Some of the initiatives taken by the government such

as successful auction of coal and spectrum, a clear GST (goods and service tax) roll out

time frame, higher FDI (foreign direct investment) in Defence and stronger relationships

with global powers such as China, the U.S. and Russia will take India to new heights. The

control of inflation has come as a big relief for the man on the street.

I travelled with Mr. Modi to attend the Hannover fair in Germany and the response of

global investors towards India was extremely positive. Most of the foreign investors were

once again eager to invest in India. I witnessed a similar positive atmosphere when the

PM visited the U.S. and the mood among NRIs was electrifying. Many of the Indians

settled abroad took a holiday just to attend the PM’s meeting at Madison Square. The PM

succeeded in giving hopes not only to Indians but to millions of Indians living abroad.

The successful evacuation of thousands of NRIs from Yemen has increased the respect of

the common men in Modi government. Yoga is the new Mantra in the U.S., where many

Universities want to teach Yoga to their students.

India is a very complex country with over 1.2 billion of population. It is not possible to see

the changes within a year. But the PM is moving in the right direction by reducing red

tape, taking a firm stand against corruption, bringing in legislation to curb black money

and making the bureaucracy more accountable. I am sure we would see the positive

changes in the fortunes of India within the next few years. With all the initiatives taken by

the government, we can expect corporate earnings and the economy to turn around by

the second-half of the current fiscal as consumer spending will increase during the

festival time.

For the next few years, the Indian government should make it easier to do business in

India. Currently, we are at the bottom of the list of ease of doing business. When

compared to the neighbouring countries, India’s corporate tax rates are still high. The

road map to reduce corporate tax in the budget by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley this

February will go a long way in convincing investors to invest in India.

If India has to grow, we have to develop our industry. We have to export more and set up

manufacturing plants, which can take on competition from any other country across the

world. The youth and the poor in India finally see a hope in Mr. Modi.

Finally, there could be challenges like a deficient rainfall or unexpected global events (like

a crash in crude oil and commodity prices) which could send the world markets in

turmoil. But with a leader like Mr. Modi, I am sure India will overcome these challenges.

To sum up, I would say: Gujarat ke sant, tune kar diya kamaal.

(V. N. Dhoot is the Chairman of Videocon group)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 21, 2015

‘States unlikely to bridge gap in funding’

VIDYA VENKAT

Greater share in taxes may not compensate for budget cuts in Central schemes.

As the National Democratic Alliance government completes a

year in office, an emerging area of concern has been the fallout

of cuts for centrally sponsored social welfare schemes in Budget

2015-16.

The Centre, which accepted the recommendations of the 14th

Finance Commission in February this year, has argued that the

increased share of tax revenue allocation for States as per its recommendations, will

compensate for the reduction in Central spending on social sector programmes. However,

experts from the field of economics, NGOs monitoring social welfare spending and select

think tanks have questioned this.

Steep fall

A preliminary analysis of budget allocations for food and nutrition programmes in 2015-

16 in two States – Bihar and Himachal Pradesh – conducted by the Forum for Learning

and Action with Innovation and Rigour (FLAIR), a Delhi-based NGO, has shown a steep

fall in allocations.

“As a proportion of the total Union Budget, allocation for schemes contributing to Food

and Nutrition Security is only 10.9 per cent in 2015-16, much lower than last year’s share

of 12.5 per cent,” Ajay Sinha, Executive Director, FLAIR and lead author of the report,

told The Hindu. “Our study of budgets in Bihar and Himachal Pradesh shows no

corresponding increase in allocations at the State level,” he said.

In Bihar, the report shows that allocations for the schemes contributing to food and

nutrition security came down from Rs. 8985.91 crore in 2014-15 RE (Revised Estimate) to

Rs. 6054.447 crore in 2015-16 BE (Budget Estimate), a drop of 32.6 per cent. In

Himachal Pradesh, there was an increase of 8.76 per cent in the allocations for schemes

contributing to food and nutrition security from Rs. 2326.19 crore in 2014-15 RE to

Rs.2425.69 crore in 2015-16. However, this does not adequately compensate for the

decrease in allocation at the Union level, the report shows. The researchers for the Report

compared previous years’ RE with this years’ BE as RE for this year is not available as yet.

‘Misleading explanation’

Speaking at an event organised in the capital on Wednesday to review the performance of

one year of Modi government, eminent economist Prabhat Patnaik said, “The substantial

reduction in social sector spending by the NDA government over the past year made it

clear that all the explanations about the increase in state share of taxation from 32 per

cent to 42 per cent is misleading as the total transfer of Central budget to States had

reduced from 6.1 per cent to 5.8 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product.”

He said this reduction was ruinous especially for poorer States like Uttarakhand, Bihar

and Odisha. With the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax, the autonomy of the

States to raise their own resources and levy taxes would be further curtailed, thus

preventing States from being able to compensate the lack of budgetary support.

‘Schemes of no use’

Social activist Aruna Roy, who was speaking on behalf of the civil society group Jan

Awaaz said the poor and the marginalised will not benefit from any of the contributory

insurance and pension schemes launched by the NDA government as the social sector

spending cuts had hurt their ability to earn. “If there are no jobs under MNREGA due to

budget cuts, how will the poor contribute money to avail of insurance schemes of the

government?” she asked.

She further said the NDA government’s emphasis on a paperless office was a move

towards an unaccountable system, making it difficult to track decisions taken within

closed doors .

Sona Mitra, Research Coordinator at the Centre for Budget and Governance

Accountability has recently authored a paper ‘The Myth of Increased Resources for States’

published in Macroscan in which she has argued that though net spending abilities for

States has increased under the 14th Finance Commission, in real terms that increase is

not reflected in financing expenditures for the social sector.

She told The Hindu: “States have to increase their budgets for schemes such as ICDS by

50 per cent to cover for Central cuts, over and above other expenditures they incur. We

spoke to the health department in Maharashtra who told us that they were waiting for the

government to issue directives on spending. However, the NITI Aayog’s proposed white

paper on this would not be ready until the end of June.”

As a result of this, States are now exploring the idea of a supplementary budget, in order

to compensate for the lack of resources, but this process will not be over until August.

Meanwhile, the uncertainties faced by State departments over funding have stalled social

welfare projects, she said.

This article was published in The Hindu on May 21, 2015

A strong show amid varied challenges

CHANDRAJIT BANERJEE

The Union government's policies have shown results with investments picking up and the economy showing definite signs of a recovery. Industrial growth has turned around, and the stage is set for a spurt in industrialisation.

Coming to power in May 2014, the two most significant

challenges faced by the Modi Government were a sharp

slowdown in the investment cycle and a loss of faith in

government institutions. In the face of such difficult

circumstances, it has shown single-minded focus on

development and growth, building its strategy around well-

designed campaigns such as ‘Make-in-India’ and ‘Swachh

Bharat’. Its economic philosophy has been to make India a

stronger manufacturing base by easing business conditions within the country, and

encouraging foreign investment.

These policies have shown results with investments picking up and the economy showing

definite signs of a recovery. Industrial growth has turned around, and the stage is set for a

spurt in industrialisation as our competitiveness has improved. Take the case of the

power sector where the country has achieved significant capacity additions. Once

transmission and distribution constraints are taken care of, industry will be able to

reduce its excessive dependence on diesel generators. The entire process of e-auctioning

of coal blocks has provided much-needed transparency to the coal allocation process

while mining, in general, is expected to revive with competitive bidding being introduced

following the passage of the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation)

(Amendment) Act.

Perhaps the government’s biggest achievement on the economic front has been its ability

to tackle inflationary pressure. The sharp moderation in inflation should not be

attributed purely to the happenstance of falling oil prices but also to determined policy

action. These include using excess food stocks to cool down food prices and limiting the

profligate increase in minimum support prices. Sticking to the process of fiscal

consolidation has itself helped in curbing inflationary pressure. It is to be hoped that

further reduction in subsidies and a move towards direct benefits transfer will help keep a

lid on inflation, especially as oil prices have begun climbing up.

So far, the government has been somewhat fortunate in the external circumstances that

determine the economy’s short-term performance. Thus, the sharp fall in the price of oil

and other commodities has helped in moderating inflation and controlling the fiscal

deficit. However, adverse weather conditions at home have dealt a blow to the country’s

agricultural production and uncertainty about the coming monsoon continues to weigh

upon the performance of the agricultural sector. This underlines the importance of

investing in long-term assets so that dependence on rainfall is reduced, agricultural

productivity is enhanced and the agricultural supply-chain is developed.

A key piece in the domestic strategy has been greater empowerment of States. It is

increasingly apparent that key areas of reform ranging from labour to land and

infrastructure lie within the domain of the States. States are also responsible for

improving peoples’ access to critical social sectors including education and healthcare.

The government has, therefore, increased the percentage of tax revenue transferred to

States while doing away with their dependence on Plan-based fund transfers. This is a

major advance in fiscal federalism wherein states will become responsible for their own

development. At the same time, the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST)

will introduce a uniform tax system in the country. The challenge for the government in

the medium-term is to tackle the issue of creating livelihoods to fulfil the aspirations of

people. It is by now well appreciated that while the Indian economy did well after the

initial reforms in the 1990s opened it to greater competition, it has so far failed to

leverage its demographic strength. Employment has remained a concern, and many

young people remain locked into low productivity jobs. Enterprises in India remain small

with various disincentives to growth. These include the large number of clearances and

permits that are still required to start and operate a business as well as labour laws that

kick in once an establishment grows beyond a certain size. The lack of well-developed

infrastructure only adds to the constraints.

Policies are being drafted keeping in mind the need to remove such impediments to

growth. Measures have been taken to facilitate infrastructure building on a large scale

where the challenges are many. Significant new initiatives include work on high speed

trains and modernisation of railways stations, focus on urban infrastructure through the

smart cities programme and introduction of the hybrid annuity model for road building.

The bill on land acquisition is critical for implementation of large infrastructure projects,

as it aims to ease procedures in critical areas such as industrial corridors, PPP projects,

rural infrastructure, affordable housing and defence. Ultimately, the provision of better

infrastructure will be critical for the successful implementation of the ‘Make-in-India’

project.

What is heartening is that a clear direction has now been set for the growth and

development of the country. Industry has found new energy to participate in programmes

such as Smart Cities, Digital India and Sanitation of schools.

CII, for example, is working with its member companies to construct 10,000 toilets in

government schools by March 2016. Much progress has also been achieved in developing

a skill curriculum that is aligned to industry’s needs. Greater prevalence and acceptance

of vocational education has made college students employable by industry.

With these developments, the partnership between government and industry has become

one of shared responsibility towards building the nation.

(The writer is Director General, CII)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 21, 2015

There is a palpable sense of hope and confidence KUMAR MANGALAM BIRLA

One year after it swept into power riding

on a historic mandate, the Government

led by Prime Minister Modi has restored

a faltering economy back on track. The wheels of Government

are moving. There is a palpable sense of hope and confidence,

and better days to come.

The uptick in the economy is perceptible. GDP growth in FY

2014-15 was 7.4 per cent. The Index of Industrial Production grew 2.8 per cent in the

April-February period of FY 2014-15, compared to a decline of 0.1 per cent in the

corresponding period last year. The current account deficit has been contained and

foreign exchange reserves stood at $341.6 billion at 2015 March-end, compared to $304.2

billion a year ago. The fiscal deficit target of 4.1 per cent of GDP has been achieved. The

Wholesale Price Index inflation for all commodities averaged 2 per cent in FY 2014-15,

against 6 per cent in FY 2013-14. During the year, the rupee has been one of the most

stable currencies against the U.S. dollar. The performance has prompted the rating

agencies to upgrade the outlook for India.

PM Modi has moved swiftly in key areas. A fair and transparent auction process was

speedily implemented to allocate coal mines, resulting in a surge of revenues to the

Centre and to States where the mines are located. In the same vein, the auction of

spectrum has set the stage for unleashing the telecom revolution. The decision to shift to

pooled pricing for natural gas will help to clear bottlenecks in the energy sector.

Concerted steps are being taken to restructure the non-performing assets of banks. The

Government has shifted to market-based pricing of petrol and diesel. The landmark

nationwide Goods and Services Tax regime is now much closer to taking off.

Changes are happening at the micro level too. For instance, the number of factory

inspections by different inspectors is sought to be drastically reduced. Moves are also

afoot to revamp the Factories Act, the Apprenticeship Act, the Industrial Disputes Act

and the Contract Labour Act. Once these changes are implemented, it will be easier to do

business in India.

Many of the initiatives bear a distinct stamp of innovativeness. Game changing reforms

such as the JAM trinity (Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar identity, Mobile) for effective subsidy

delivery, crucial tax reforms, and huge tax devolution to the states augur well for the

nation. The Jan Dhan Yojana connects almost all households to bank accounts. Welfare

and subsidy schemes have been redesigned so that leakages are reduced and benefits flow

to those who need it the most. The Mudra bank will boost the funding available for small

and medium enterprises, who account for the much of the employment generation.

There are numerous missions that have been unveiled. These span a wide spectrum,

among them making India a manufacturing hub, making cities smart, improving the

levels of sanitation and cleanliness, pushing bottom of the pyramid insurance coverage,

developing highways, and capitalizing on India’s coastline and inland waterways.

One of the more notable and visible achievement of the government relates to India’s

global footprint. The Prime Minister’s diplomatic push in the past year has extended

across a wide swathe of the world — our South Asian neighbours, the U.S., China, Japan,

Australia, South Korea, France, Germany and Canada. Key breakthroughs have been

made in areas such as nuclear energy, defence, infrastructure and attracting foreign

direct investments. India has played a lead role in establishing a multilateral financial

institution that rivals the existing World Bank and IMF. The efforts to build bridges to the

Indian Diaspora are laudable. He has given a clear message that there is much more ‘ease

of doing business’ now in India.

India’s successful rescue and evacuation efforts, in Yemen and Nepal, have raised its

diplomatic profile and standing immensely. The payoffs from these initiatives will surely

unfold in the coming years. There are areas that still need to be addressed, key among

them being legislation on land acquisition, revamping of labour laws, boosting growth

and exports, generating employment, and stepping up agriculture output and

productivity. The PM carries with him the burden of huge expectations. The initiatives

over the past year have sown the seeds of future growth. There is every reason to be

optimistic that the reforms bandwagon will keep rolling, steadily and surely.

(Mr. Kumar Mangalam Birla is the Chairman of the Aditya Birla Group)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 22, 2015

The one-man show

ANITA JOSHUA

The Prime Minister is mostly absent in Parliament. When present, he is scornful of the system.

On his first day, first show at Parliament House on May 20, 2014,

Prime Minister-in-waiting Narendra Modi was a picture of

humility. He was seemingly overwhelmed by the moment and by

the enormity of it all, even choking on his words, standing in the

imposing 87-year-old structure awaiting the formal coronation

by his party.

He knelt on the stairs of Parliament House to touch his forehead to the ground in a show

of respect to the “temple of democracy” and later acknowledged the work done by

previous governments for India’s development. There was little sign of his default option

— the stump speech.

That carefully calibrated appearance at the Bharatiya Janata Party Parliamentary Party

meeting in the Central Hall of Parliament House had a short use-by date. Seventeen days

later, on June 6, while introducing his Ministers to the Lok Sabha, Prime Minister Modi

encountered his first brush with some heckling from the fragmented Opposition when it

became evident that Minister of State for Power Piyush Goyal was not present.

Visibly irritated at being interrupted as he raced through the introductions — almost

turning a parliamentary convention into a roll-call — he cast an impatient glance at the

Opposition and said in his gruff style in Hindi, “OK, will introduce him later”. There was

none of the tentativeness of a rookie, not just at the premier’s job but also as a Member of

Parliament.

He is, after all, the first of 15 Prime Ministers, including interim premier Gulzari Lal

Nanda, to get the top job without any parliamentary experience. By a curious coincidence,

he also entered the Gujarat Assembly for the first time as Chief Minister without any

legislative background.

Charges piling up

According to Shaktisinh Gohil, former Leader of the Opposition in the Gujarat Assembly,

Mr. Modi is trying to replicate the much-talked-about Gujarat model in Parliament. “He

once got 12 laws passed in 17 minutes in 2009 after getting the Opposition suspended

from the House. Under him, the Assembly would be convened once every six months just

to meet the constitutional requirement.”

The Congress insists that Mr. Modi “never addressed the legislature — not even during

the motion of thanks to the Governor's address — nor responded to questions pertaining

to ministries under his watch.” Further, a third of the starred questions asked by the

Opposition would never even reach the Assembly, where it had become a norm to

suspend Opposition members every Session. And the Gujarat Assembly never met for

more than 23 days in a year through his years as Chief Minister.

With a bicameral legislature, multiparty Opposition and national media scrutiny, no

replication of the “Gujarat model of parliamentary democracy” has been attempted in

Parliament till now but charges of “disregard for parliamentary procedures” are piling up.

Standing committees are being given a go-by in the name of the ‘speed’ mantra of the

Modi government, new bills are sprung upon the House through supplementary business

circulated at the eleventh hour, efforts were made to amend certain laws by “smuggling”

them into the Finance Bill to bypass the Rajya Sabha — where the government is in a

minority — and, now, the two Houses are being pitted against each other to reduce the

significance of the Council of States because it is “indirectly” elected. “Mr. Modi entered

Parliament with the theatrical gesture of calling it a temple but that is only if it is

monotheistic. There can’t be more than one god and this is reflected in Finance Minister

Arun Jaitley — who does a ventriloquist’s job — questioning the indirectly elected Rajya

Sabha’s right to scrutinise Bills cleared by the Lok Sabha,” says Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay,

author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times.

Mr. Modi himself rarely puts in an appearance — unless absolutely unavoidable — and

even missed the crucial vote on the Constitution Amendment to introduce the Goods and

Services Tax regime. He made amends the following day when the Constitution

Amendment for the land swap agreement with Bangladesh was put to vote and, in a rare

show of bipartisanship, even thanked the Opposition for its passage.

Few interventions

Let alone the Opposition, he seldom engages with his own party legislators — or ministers

— when he does attend the Lok Sabha. Few BJP members dare to approach him, even

though he is the Leader of the House. His interventions have been few and far between,

and he does not brook counter-questions. After ceaselessly calling his predecessor ‘Maun

(silent) Mohan Singh’, Mr. Modi’s silence in Parliament speaks volumes. Even the

mandatory statement presented in both Houses after an overseas visit is left to External

Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.

The Opposition held its fire for the first couple of sessions but began to cry foul from the

Winter Session of 2014 when it became evident that the Prime Minister had made more

addresses in parliaments abroad than at home in his first five months in office. Till then,

the only time he had addressed both Houses was in the mandatory reply to the Motion of

Thanks to the President’s Address.

He was conciliatory then but when it was time to repeat the annual exercise this year, Mr.

Modi went back to his default option — scornfully announcing in the Lok Sabha that he

would keep the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act alive as a “monument

to the failure” of successive Congress governments and accusing the Communists of

following an “imported idea” in the Rajya Sabha. In the process, he invited upon himself

and his government the first embarrassment in the Upper House, with a united

Opposition forcing an amendment in the Motion of Thanks, something that has

happened only three times since Independence.

Sitaram Yechury (CPI-M), who pressed for the amendment, said he would have

withdrawn it had Mr. Modi heard him out. “But it seems they [treasury benches] want a

fight. So let there be a fight.” For close watchers of Mr. Modi’s political journey like Mr.

Gohil and Mr. Mukhopadhyay, his evident lack of interest in Parliament — except as

theatre for the occasional grandstanding — is no surprise. “It reflects his inability to work

with systems and structures. He is most comfortable with a unitary system — one people,

one faith, one institution, one House (read unicameral legislature) — where there is only

one-way traffic; a monologue, not dialogue. And, certainly, no questions.”

anita.joshua@thehindu.co.in

This article was published in The Hindu on May 22, 2015

Will Modi trot or knot?

DILIP CHERIAN

The thin veil that separates a strong decisive leader from an authoritarian strongman is fraying at the edges.

That lone heckler from among Uttar Pradesh’s feisty MPs

hasn’t triggered any muscle knot in his foot soldiers who are

out to battle. No effort is spared to mark ‘The Sarkar’s’ first

anniversary in office. BJP spokespersons nationally, after

instructions from the Delhi brass, fan out to every corner and

studio. Mantris will schlep it to their constituencies to repeat

the same. Government goes into an overdrive to project

achievements and everyone will vie with the other to

overstate exaggerated targets. But beneath that hype what’s the lingering image of ‘The

Man’?

The holographic images (which cost Rs. 60 crore) portended it domestically at election

time, but today he’s global. From Myanmar to Mughal Gardens he schmoozes global

leaders, and from Madison Garden to Shanghai he’s the darling of Modi-chanting Global

Indians, who are expected to be the shining ambassadors of the less-lucky ones back

home. Our Man is now actually everywhere.

This is a man whose image remains that of an unchallenged champion. He may slip or be

on the back foot but is he ever going to admit it? Never! The Modi image does not include

retreat or apology or even fleeting self-doubt.

Master of the Image game

The current avatar we have of Leader Maximus is that of a noticeably fairer visage, with

carefully coiffured hair and never a stitch out of place (yes, yes, I’m coming to that too).

Professionally accoutered, he choreographs appropriate hand gestures and an arsenal of

clever acronyms and alliterations (that the fecund Mr. S crafts) peppers his speeches. You

are watching a Master of the Image game.

He strode through his first year with amazing smoothness. A pace that goes well beyond

what a brute majority commands. It’s his running style. He displayed it recently in the

sudden springing of the Rafale deal during a slope through France. He cut a swathe

through red tape and struck a perfect Gujju bargain. This is classic Modi. He reiterated it

in China with an e-visa announcement that hurdled smoothly over what his spooks had

set up before.

There have, of course, been a few flubs. There are hints now of a subterranean shift in

public perception of The Man.

A recent online poll shows Mr. Modi enjoying approval ratings of 74 per cent, comforting

for any leader, even if it is lower than the 82 per cent he had 10 months ago before his

Kejriwal trashing and the monogrammed suit bashing, and of course the unchecked

braying of fundamentalists.

But he is still triumphantly at the top of the political heap. He may be hobbled by the

Land Bill progress, but at least the jumla (pet phrase) about black money not having

come home is firmly buried with his personally designed draconian money laundering

bill. Rahul Gandhi depradations he shrugs away and for him the Opposition are pygmies.

The swift sprinter we saw on the election trail has now comfortably settled into the pace

of a long distance runner. He handcrafts image personally through Mann Ki Baat radio

talks and a multilingual but constant Twitter stream. Two dinners with scribes, at Mantri

Arun Jaitley’s home, added a direct-to-home media strategy. His campaigns and

branding are vibrant; be it ‘Swacch Bharat’ or ‘Make In India’ or ‘Jan Dhan’. The message

stays steadily on ‘The Man’. Not even a hint that he’s part of any relay team.

But is everything really hunky dory? The Man’s sprinter-like persona and his effortless

jumping hurdles in 18 countries in 12 months notwithstanding, people back home have

questions about the arrival of the acche din. Mantris and their madaris are balking at his

massive centralisation of power in the all-powerful Prime Minister’s Office. And the thin

veil that separates a strong decisive leader from an unabashedly authoritarian strong man

is now fraying at the edges.

The big inflexion point coming up is the Bihar elections. If it delivers the political

equivalent of a double whammy (after the Delhi debacle) it could hurt NaMo’s serial-

winner image; in which case expectations are that a new NaMo may be unveiled. Will the

image segue from ‘man on the track’ to ‘pugilist in the ring’? Will it be closer to the

more Dabangg-like Modi that Gujarat saw in the panic after the riots? At that time,

mantris vanished, police ruled and diktat replaced democracy for many.

The upswell of anxiety in the last few months may be purely episodal. But those watching

the trends, social as well as economic, tend to worry now. Minorities and farmers seem

restive, whether one goes by the incidents of Naxal violence or farmer protests. The

recent coal and spectrum auctions mean that costs, across a wide range of industries, are

poised to climb. The run of good luck on global petroleum seems too good to last, as the

weekend petrol price hikes augur.

What’s worse is that nervous FIIs are sitting on edge with hot money that may flee.

Domestic capital is sulking, as black money inspectors crack the whip ominously.

India has defied doomsday scenarios before and Mr. Modi will have to break into a trot if

he is to ensure that his Version of India keeps growing. If he wants the laurels of a leader

who either won us the Olympiad (even if it is after 2024), or a Security Council seat, or

even just the moniker of next ‘Global Superpower’, he will now have to break into a quick

pace as Lap 2 begins. Image exercises alone won’t hack it.

(Dilip Cherian is founder of Perfect Relations.)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 22, 2015

Year 1: Still Waiting for Acche Din?

SHIV VISVANATHAN

At the end of one year in office, has Narendra Modi met expectations and delivered on his promises? Our writers take up five crucial areas — politics, society, environment, education and the economy — to assess the Prime Minister’s first year.

Society: A victory of propaganda

Narendra Modi’s favourite incarnation was the hologram. It

added dimensions to his stature and hyphenated him between

the real and the simulacra because Modi has to be seen as a

projection of the social. He is a social construct and it is the

social changes that he has triggered, influenced and created that

one must capture.

As a pracharak, as CM and now as PM, Modi created a vision of the nation state, as the

ultimate loyalty, and then sought to rectify its history, and deeply and fundamentally

created a majoritarian state that for the first time felt home in history and modernity.

Modi has consolidated a Hindu middle-class, which is proud of its moment in History. He

created a Nehru Mukta Bharat, which literally delegitimised words like socialism and

secularism. The BJP failed to remove it from the Constitution but it has demobilised

these words.

The first year of the Modi regime is thus not an achievement in policy or economic

performance but in institutionalising an image, a mirroring of it in the electoral world. It

was a victory of propaganda where the middle class, desperate for growth, found an

ecology to articulate its world view. It beliefs were no longer embarrassing. It could

combine religion and technology, recover the past as nostalgia, reduce history to myth

and claim it was being scientific. It was a particular idea of India — not a diverse India of

ideas — that Modi and his BJP regime created.

Modi won a war of ideas and can now create a set of cultures and institutions around it.

Legitimising this world and its weird combination of culture, nationalism, religion and

technology was the diaspora. The diaspora validated Modi’s dream of a new middle-class

India, which wanted to feel at home in India and secure and powerful in the world. In the

first year, Modi created a social imaginary and marshalled the electoral, political focus

that would help routinise this world.

It also helped remove claims of the informal economy, doubts and protests of marginal

and minorities by building a new religion around growth and development. In fact civil

society groups, which criticised the costs of development, were virtually condemned as

seditious. Margin, civil society, radicalism, minority retreated before the new cult of the

nation state committed to growth. Modi was the new prophet and the priest of this cult of

development. In fact one could witness this evangelism on his return from Canada, when

he called nuclear energy the second modernity.

It is at the level of ideas and their incorporation into culture that the regime is

performing. At the level of bureaucracy, economy, or institution building, it has little to

report. In fact the regime’s celebration of itself seems to alternate between electoral

victory and investment promises.

All this is obvious and clear. What is difficult to sense is the silences, the doubts, the

ambiguities created by the regime. One hears little of dissent today, despite the sheer

cheekiness of the Naxal attempts to kidnap people attending his rally. The regime has

created a society through brute consensus and acclamation. Most of the news is about the

technocrats around him, labouring like worker bees to create his image of a new society of

instant cities, cloned IITs, a privatised medicine and a devastated ecology. A majoritarian

India will celebrate the percolation of its ideas. The question is: will history and future

feel equally open ended five years from now? The moral luck of politics is all on his side

now as he comes up victorious trumping all dissent and opposition.

This article was published in The Hindu on May 23, 2015

An education in acronyms

ANJALI MODY

Amid a plethora of cleverly named new schemes and tech-fixes, the HRD Ministry is busy tinkering with bureaucratic processes.

Every year multiple agencies, private and public, tell us that an

unacceptable number of school-going children at age 14 are

functionally illiterate and that their numbers are not declining.

Teachers and teaching, almost everyone is agreed, are at the

heart of this problem. Every year a tiny fraction of hopefuls

clears the Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET) or TET

exams necessary to a get a teaching job in a government school.

There are massive teacher vacancies across the country and the

question that those responsible for CTET are grappling with is whether the tests to

qualify as a primary schoolteacher should be at the class 10 level or the class 8 level.

Lowering already low standards for qualifying teachers in order to fill the massive

teaching vacancies is clearly not the solution to the problem of low learning outcomes in

schools. Changes in pedagogy and improvements in teacher education, however, top the

list of necessary changes if we expect the trend to reverse any time in the future.

A promising start

The Union government appeared to get off to a good start with the announcement of a

teacher education mission. The Prime Minister inaugurated the mission with great

fanfare, speaking of a “five-year training course” and exporting teachers across the world

“in lakhs”. His government, however, allocated only Rs. 180 crore a year for five years

towards this goal. This works out to less than Rs. 400 per existing teacher per year — a

derisory sum that suggests the Prime Minister is prone to flights of fancy and that his

government has absolutely no understanding of the enormity of the problem. Combined

with cuts across the board in the Centre’s education spending, the message that the

government appears to be sending is that mass public education is not its priority; it just

hopes the State governments will do something about it.

School education is, in the main, the concern of State governments. But it was to address

the failure of State governments and the huge regional disparities that the Centre

intervened in the first place. From a universal mid-day meal scheme to Sarva Shiksha

Abhiyan, central allocations have been responsible for vastly increasing student

enrolment, attendance and completion. However, their focus on numbers — the

quantifiable goals beloved of both politicians and bureaucrats — has ignored the larger

issue of learning or the quality of education. The next logical stage, for any government

serious about mass education in the country, would be to devise a sustainable policy for

improving teaching and learning standards across the country. The Human Resource

Development (HRD) Minister, however, reinforced the impression that this government

does not grasp what is at issue when she told Parliament: “Insofar as budgetary cuts with

regard to Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Mid-Day Meals Scheme and RMSA [Rashtriya

Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan] are concerned, as you know, in higher education there has

been an increase in allocation.” Comparing apples and oranges is a clumsy bureaucratic

defence.

Sadly, bigger budgetary allocations for higher education, even if true, do not signal a

greater understanding of what higher education in India needs. Over the years the MHRD

and its clerically minded agent, the University Grants Commission, have fuelled a race to

the bottom, reifying credentials over an education, setting up new institutions rather than

strengthening existing ones, and denying universities autonomy through the capricious

use of their powers.

In the last year, the MHRD and the UGC have done practically nothing to change course,

implementing policy proposals of the previous government. So the opening of new IITs

and IIMs in all States continues apace, even as existing ones have problems filling faculty

vacancies and grapple with issues of quality in research and teaching. The Choice-Based

Credit System (CBCS) and the uniform curriculum that goes with it have been in the

MHRD pipeline for years. This government takes credit for pushing it through. Its

grammatically challenged announcement describes the CBCS as “providing for more

choices for students to opt for employable courses through a system of flexible credits….”

And, the UGC justifies its need thus: “Because of the diversity in the evaluation system

followed by different universities in India, students have suffered acceptance of their

credentials, at times across the university system, as well as the employment agencies.”

And so, the most significant ‘new idea’ in higher education in the country’s premier

universities is reduced to “employable credits” and credentials that “employment

agencies” can read.

Bureaucratic control

The one major policy decision in higher education mooted by this government has been

the rollback of the four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP), which, Delhi University,

backed by the United Progressive Alliance-run MHRD, had put in place. The manner of

the rollback was, however, entirely in keeping with the style of the government’s past.

Less than a month after the new government was sworn in, the UGC, in consonance with

the BJP’s manifesto promise, issued a directive overturning its own endorsement of the

FYUP. The Ministry also persists with the sort of political interference and bureaucratic

control over institutions that in the first place set their downward course — meddling

with appointments, filling up positions with ideological allies, and undermining

independent institutions.

There is no surer sign of a lack of ideas at the top than cleverly named new schemes and

tech-fixes. The government is, according to the Minister, putting its weight behind

Massive Open Online Courses, with a programme called Swayam (Study Webs of Active

Learning for Young Aspiring Minds). The expectation is that the IITs and IIMs will post

lectures online, which students who have not made it into these institutions can access,

learn from and, if they choose, obtain a certificate on the cheap (“just Rs. 500”, according

to the Minister). MOOCs are a useful tool where learning levels are high and Internet

penetration is not restricted to less than a fifth of the population (mostly men), the

majority of who access the Internet on a phone.

But, tech fixes — unmindful of the access to and cost of phones, computers and data —

are a thing with this government. Schools can now post their students’ progress reports

online, and parents can keep tabs on their children’s homework and attendance via

mobile phone messages. And the Ministry also hopes to give “free of cost” access to

NCERT school textbooks via a mobile phone app.

The government has also begun what it claims is an “inclusive, participatory and holistic”

consultation for its promised New Education Policy, through a website called mygov.in.

The website has received suggestions and comments from between 300 and 1,000 people

(mostly men) on twenty-two, sometimes overlapping, themes listed for discussion. In

parallel, the Ministry has set up a seven-tier consultation starting with village education

councils and ending with a national task force. The scale of the consultation (2.75 lakh

village meetings to be held on one day, 6,600 block level meetings, etc.) is designed to

impress. But like the mygov.in exercise, just the appearance of a wide consultation seems

to be the goal. VECs, Block Education Officers, and the like are responsible for

administrative supervision of programmes like the SSA and are not concerned with

pedagogy or teacher training or student learning. This entire exercise reeks of

bureaucratic inventiveness — to create a sense of purposefulness in the absence of real

purpose or to obscure processes whose outcomes will be delivered as a fait accompli.

Either way, we will not know until the end.

A year is perhaps not long enough to make an assessment of a government’s

achievements. But it is long enough to judge whether the government has set a forward

course or if it is meandering without purpose. The HRD Minister is a consummate public

performer, presenting her Ministry in the media and in Parliament as purposeful, and

herself as a facilitator of the Prime Minister’s ideas. The trouble is the Ministry is

purposefully involved in bureaucratic processes and the Prime Minister appears to have

no good ideas. It looks like this government’s education policy is stuck in byways, with no

clue of how to get out.

(Anjali Mody is a freelance journalist and researcher and was formerly with The

Hindu)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 23, 2015

Modi should learn from the Chinese their deliberate rejection of self-promotion

BASHARAT PEER

Pankaj Mishra spoke to Basharat Peer about his exploration of China, the Indian encounter with China and East Asia, along with other issues.

One of the few Indian writers to have travelled extensively through China and the East

Asian countries in its sphere of influence, Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of the

Empire was a path-breaking work of intellectual history that recounted and explained

the ideas and lives of Asian intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore and Chinese

thinkers Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen, who were critical to forming nationalist ideas

that challenged colonialism. He followed it up with The Great Clamour, a book of ideas

and reportage. Mr. Mishra travelled on China’s high-speed train to Tibet, interviewed

Chinese intellectuals and poets, reported on the booming cities of Shanghai and Hong

Kong, and ventured forth to investigate politics and ideas in Taiwan, Indonesia,

Malaysia, and Japan. He spoke to Basharat Peer about his exploration of China, the

Indian encounter with China and East Asia, ideas of democracy, capitalism, and

authoritarianism, and of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s travels in the region.

How different was the reality of China from the ideas of China you had

received in India?

The Sino-Indian war in 1962 war has fundamentally shaped and distorted Indian

attitudes towards China. It also obscured a great deal of what has happened in China

since 1962. We have this slightly hostile view of China as an adversary, this enemy that

stabbed us in the back, and precipitated Nehru’s death. It is time to move on from that

particular narrative. China is now a hugely important trading partner and there is now

serious talk about resolving the outstanding border issues. One of the casualties of that

era after the 1962 war is that we possess very little knowledge and information and

analysis of our own about China. We have been largely dependent on foreign, largely

American, sources. There is an extremely weak tradition of Indian writing on China.

There used to be a few figures like G.P. Deshpande, many of them from the Left tradition,

who wrote extremely grippingly about China. And we still have some great Indian

intellectual historians of China in Prasenjit Duara and Viren Murthy. But in the last 10-15

years, with the changes unleashed by Deng Xiaoping, China has changed so fast, so

enormously that we haven’t really kept track of what has been happening there. Pallavi

Aiyar was keeping tabs for a while and now she’s left China. We have some International

Rrelations experts and security-oriented think-tankers, but that kind of writing doesn’t

take us very far, or we have ideologues like Arun Shourie who excel in unsustainable

generalisations about entire collectivities. Compare this to the rigorous and sustained

intellectual work on Chinese society and politics done by Australian and Japanese writers

and academics, or even the tiny Taiwanese intelligentsia, and you’ll see what I mean.

How far ahead from India is China? If we compare the two countries using

the terms like “progress.”

I don’t like measuring progress in quite that way. If one were to embrace those indicators,

then you would have to conclude that in terms of human development rates and sheer

amount of infrastructure, China is certainly 30 years ahead of India. It is not to

completely fall for this idea of China being this great modernising nation. We have to take

into account the immense amount of suffering the Chinese people have undergone in this

process. One can’t separate the two.

We get to hear a lot about the Chinese cities. What is the Chinese village like?

How do we compare rural China to rural India?

Life in a Chinese village is much more organised because the Chinese Communist Party

has a presence even in the remotest Chinese village, a presence of the kind that no

governmental or non-governmental organisation has in Indian villages. That creates a

sense of unity and uniformity that is missing in India. Indian villages are much more

heterogeneous.

I think the presence of caste in India, how the villages are geographically structured on

caste lines is very different from China. The presence of an egalitarian culture is striking

in a Chinese village. The old hierarchy of caste, the cruelty and brutalities that you see in

Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, you don’t see in Chinese villages. The hierarchies in China are

more about class, about a rich guy lording over the poor and the weak.

After China, you have spent time in several East Asian countries in its orbit.

You have written about Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia and other places.

These are places that we have mostly read about in the account of Western

writers. How different is it from an Indian perspective?

As an Indian, you feel easily connected with certain histories in places like Indonesia,

where one sees because of the presence of the Hindu-Buddhist past, Hindus still living

there, or Muslims performing rituals that are instantly familiar. The other thing I found

completely fascinating in places like Malaysia is the migration from India and China, how

they absorbed the migrants from southern India or China. Those are things that you find

very interesting. You have Sikhs and Tamils in Malaysia, you have the Chinese in Penang,

they come together to create new syncretic cultures, something an American or a British

writer might not look for.

The other interesting thing happening in these places is that the rise of China is

transforming these places not only in economic terms — we have to look carefully what

the overseas Chinese have been doing. They were the first investors in the Chinese

economy. The Indonesian Chinese, the Taiwan Chinese, the Chinese in Singapore, were

the first investors in smaller, second tier cities in China. American corporates and

businesses didn’t want to go into the hinterland. The result is that the political profile of

the overseas Chinese in Malaysia — a troubled racial society — and Indonesia has

changed.

The Chinese immigrants in Malaysia certainly suffered a lot. They had

economic rights but were forced to keep their heads down after riots. How

has that changed?

A lot of Chinese nationalism was a construction of Chinese expats because the overseas

Chinese felt humiliated by their experience of living among majority communities in

California, Singapore, Manila and Penang. Now, there is a strong sense of the rise of

Mother China, and jubilation at the prospect. And the position of the overseas Chinese

has become both strong and precarious at the same time. The Indonesian Chinese were

scape-goated in the last 15 years but there is now the recognition among majoritarian

politicians that these people belong to a larger Chinese world and you have to be careful.

It has changed the politics of places like Indonesia and Malaysia.

Is China the New America, the new hegemonic force in these East Asian

nations?

One of the things you hear in these places, including Japan, is that India is absent. Indian

soft power is absent in these places. We are traditionally not well equipped to project that

kind of power and our economic heft is weaker than China. China will certainly be a

bigger player. And overseas Chinese constitute a much bigger and more powerful

diasporic community in these places. India could assume a more prominent role and it

would be welcomed because it has a much better profile than China. China is embraced

economically but it is also feared and suspected. This is why the United States has seen an

opportunity and is desperately trying to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade

agreement that contains all major economies of the region but pointedly excludes China.

It is America’s great chance of containing China’s economic influence in the region, and

limiting its overall strategic and military reach. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election

showed the intense desire among the Indian middle classes for an East Asian style

strongman. He has completed a year in power now.

You have researched China and the East Asian societies led by strongmen.

How do you interpret this desire for strongmen?

What we are seeing is a convergence between the East Asian and the Indian narratives,

and the breakdown of the cold war binary of democracy and authoritarianism. India used

to be the democratic exception and most other countries were authoritarian or

dictatorships. Mr. Modi with his corporate chums is the greatest Indian exponent of

capitalism with East Asian characteristics. I think one has to think of Mr. Modi along with

Suharto, Lee Kwan Yew, and the CCP provincial bosses who then make it big in Beijing.

These are all control freaks supported by the corporate and technocratic classes who

prefer top-down solutions and rapid decision-making, and have contempt for anything

that doesn’t directly advance their interests. So the rise of the middle class in Asia has

assisted the growth of authoritarian populism rather than democracy.

Fortunately, India is too diverse a place for any Modi to flourish. A truly authoritarian

leader like Suharto won’t be able to flourish for long in India. Sixty five years of deeply

flawed democratic processes have nevertheless created an India where someone like Mr.

Modi can enjoy only limited successes.

And he still seems to be struggling after one year in power and too many trips abroad. In

China, he looked as he has looked on his other foreign jaunts — a man still savouring his

new power, enjoying its trappings, and getting too addicted to fawning NRIs. The Chinese

cannot but be wary of Mr. Modi and his over-the-top bonding with Shinzo Abe, the most

aggressively nationalist leader Japan has known in years. And India itself will not become

a major player in China’s neighbourhood simply because Mr. Modi has visited it and

played the Mongolian fiddle. China’s neighbours are economically dependent on it, and

India can’t change that reality. Nor should India try while it is itself knocking on China’s

doors for some cash. The one thing Mr. Modi and his fans really should learn from the

Chinese is their deliberate rejection of self-promotion and posturing. The Chinese in their

30 years of uninterrupted self-strengthening refrained from making any great claims for

their power and influence. On the contrary, Chinese leaders played down their strength

and emphasised the problems before them. They certainly did not seek affirmation from

overseas Chinese. In any case, we know that for India to become an attractive option for

China’s neighbours we need Mr. Modi to set aside his fiddle, get away from insecure

NRIs, do ghar vapsi and then stay at home for a while and attend to its myriad challenges.

This article was published in The Hindu on May 24, 2015

Regressive phase SITARAM YECHURY

More dangerous than unmet economic goals is the ideological chauvinism.

The King of France, Louis XV, achieved notoriety for saying,

“After me, the deluge”. As the first year of this Bharatiya

Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government

ends, Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to be amending

this to read as: “Before me, the void: After me, the deluge”. He

has gone as far to say, twice on foreign soil in May, that NRIs

were “ashamed” of being called Indians before he got elected.

During the course of this one year, we are being told ad-nauseum that Mr. Modi is

rebuilding India from the ruins left behind by six decades of successive governments.

Alas, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the six-year long NDA government have been confined to

forgotten history. Undoubtedly, there has been a plethora of unfulfilled promises, a

merciless loot of our resources and growing exploitation of our people during these

decades. This, however, is not the point of this Modi government’s public relations

exercise. Their point is to portray the Prime Minister with the arrival of a messiah a la the

mythological Kalki avatar. Never mind that the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India

has recently said that Mr. Modi must not be thought of as “Ronald Reagan on a white

horse”. The myth-manufacturing PR wheel continues to turn.

It is now clear that what has been attempted this year is an attack on whatever rights

common Indians have managed to achieve through struggles for so far. The government

is in retreat, with huge cuts in the budget, in vital areas of health, education, social

welfare, Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes sub-plans etc.

There is a new trident of challenges that is being constructed before both the country and

the people: there is an aggressive pursuit of neoliberal economic reforms, an onslaught on

the secular democratic foundations of the Indian republic by the sharpening of communal

polarisation, and a the slow but certain movement towards authoritarian rule. The last is

easily seen in the damaging of democratic institutions and the bypassing of methods

sacrosanct in a parliamentary democracy.

Economic challenges

This NDA government is aggressively pursuing neoliberal economic reforms followed by

the previous Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. All key sectors of our economy have now

being opened up for greater Foreign Direct Investment inflows. The government is

backtracking on many issues that it had opposed earlier such as permitting FDI in retail

trade. The most brazen U-turn has been the new Land Acquisition Ordinance that it has

pushed through thrice after having supported the 2013 Bill. The urgency to hand over real

estate to foreign and domestic corporates for profit maximisation is driving the

government’s agenda at the expense of ruining vast sections of our peasantry. Precious

mineral resources are being handed over for private profit along with ambitious targets of

the privatisation of the public sector. Crony capitalism is having a field day.

The statistical base year for national income accounts has been changed in order to

project the GDP growth rate in better light. Despite this, it is clear that manufacturing

and industrial growth is just not taking off. Corporates have registered an unprecedented

accumulation of inventories. This is leading to a fall in employment sharply. Coupled with

the relentless rise in the prices of all essential commodities and successive big hikes in the

prices of fuel, this is imposing severe hardships on the livelihood of our people.

Agrarian distress

The agrarian distress is deepening. For the first time since Independence, a fall in the

total cultivated area has been reported. With the hike in the prices of inputs and the sharp

decrease in subsidies, many farmers are abandoning agricultural activity as they are

unable to survive. Forced to borrow, they suffer debts that they are unable to repay. This

is resulting in continued incidents of distress suicides. The state of the workers is no

better — the share of wages as a proportion of GDP now stands a little over 10 per cent

compared to over 25 per cent in 1990-91.

On the other hand, the rich have become richer. As per the Forbes list 2014, the 100

richest people in India are all U.S.$ billionaires, i.e., 45 more than the figure of 55 in

2011. The combined wealth of these 100 billionaires comes to $346 billion. The share of

the top 1 per cent in the total wealth of households has increased from 36.8 per cent in

2000 to a phenomenal 49 per cent in 2014. The promised ‘better days’ are turning from

illusions into a nightmare for the vast majority.

Communal polarisation

Simultaneously, communal polarisation is being kept on the boil and is being sharpened

through governmental patronage. The BJP, as the political arm of the Rashtriya

Swayamsevak Sangh, is advancing the project of transforming the modern secular

democratic Indian republic into the RSS project of an intolerant ‘Hindu Rashtra’. The

communal campaigns of ghar vapsi and the stigmatisation of inter-religious marriages as

‘love jihad’ are accompanied with frenzied efforts to replace history by mythology and

philosophy by theology. This is resulting in attempts to change the curriculum of schools

and the nature of research bodies in the country. There are growing reports of communal

tensions and even riots from various corners of the country. Attacks on Muslim

minorities and targeting Christian churches in particular have grown exponentially. Mr.

Modi has not assured even on the floor of Parliament that action would be taken against

those who violate the law with impunity, by delivering inciting hate speeches.

Using the strength of its majority in the Lok Sabha, albeit with just 31 per cent of the vote

polled, the BJP bulldozed nearly 50 legislations without parliamentary scrutiny.

Parliamentary scrutiny is exercised by the Parliamentary Standing Committees

examining all legislative proposals. These committees have as their members virtually the

entire political spectrum represented in both Houses of Parliament at any point of time.

This enables them to suggest fine-tuning of these legislations and if necessary, to

reconsider or redraft some.

These are indeed ominous signals. This year has been marked by the NDA not being able

to meet economic expectations, no doubt. But it has heralded a new and retrogressive

phase in India, which is more dangerous. The government is stepping back from

international commitments made in the spheres of environment, human rights and

labour laws, the latest being the changes in the Juvenile Justice law. This government

believes in reversing progressive economics by minimising government where it is most

required — pulling millions out of poverty — and replacing it with policies for the already

rich and powerful. This, along with a narrow and chauvinistic idea of India, threatens to

push back even small social gains made. Social peace and harmony are undervalued

goods, and any attempt to tinker with social amity as political design will have explosive

consequences.

Moreover, Mr. Modi and the BJP claim as their triumph the fact that no corruption scam

has emerged during the course of this year. Does anyone recollect any such scam during

the first four years of the UPA government? Just as time exposed the UPA scams, so will

time expose this government’s record in aggressively pursuing crony capitalism.Louis

XV’s infamous remark is widely believed to have anticipated the French Revolution. What

Mr. Modi’s attempts to paint India as the land of the void before him leads to, surely time

will tell.

(Sitaram Yechury is the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 24, 2015

A year of hope

RAVI SHANKAR PRASAD

A corruption-free, pro-poor government has put India on the global map.

The biggest achievement of the National Democratic

Alliance government headed by Prime Minister Narendra

Modi is to restore confidence and hope in India. It is

important to bear in mind the context in which the

Bharatiya Janata Party-led government came to power:

the entire country was in a state of drift and despair; the

previous Prime Minister was in office but not in

authority; decision-making was paralysed, and

governance had become a serious casualty. Scams,

scandals, corruption and rent-seeking had become the order of the day. India suffered a

serious dent in its global image. Investment had almost dried up — leave aside foreign

investment, even India’s domestic businesses were wary of investing in new ventures.

Every decision smacked of corruption, whether it was coal blocks or spectrum auctions.

Today, in a short span of 12 months, the NDA government has not only succeeded in

restoring India’s image as a fast-growing economy, but also restored governance and

transparency in decision-making. In the 2015 spectrum auction, the government fetched

the highest ever price of Rs. 1.10 lakh crore. Earlier, only a few coal blocks were

auctioned; now, a huge amount of Rs. 2 lakh crore was obtained, surpassing even the

estimated value of the coal scam as projected by the Comptroller and Auditor General of

India. The zero loss theory raised by Congress leaders stands completely exposed. All this

was made possible because decision-making is fair, transparent and lawful, good

governance practices have been adopted, and rent-seeking has been eliminated. The

single biggest achievement of the present government is that there is not the faintest trace

of corruption in any government decision.

There is a renewed thrust towards reform and growth. Inflation is low, fiscal deficit has

been contained and government revenue is growing. FDI has increased from $20.8

billion (April 2013-February 2014) to $28.8 billion (2014-2015).

Strengthening cooperative federalism

In the past year, cooperative federalism has become stronger. As Prime Minister Modi

believes that States must be given greater fiscal incentives, the government has readily

agreed to the recommendations of the 14th Finance Commission to give 42 per cent of tax

revenue to the States. The role of the States in national development has been

strengthened — they have been given a direct representation in NITI Aayog. The

government has also successfully brought the States on board on the issue of Goods and

Services Tax, which will soon become a reality.

The government’s priority is the poor and marginalised. Social security is being

strengthened. Banking the unbanked, funding the unfunded, and expanding the scope of

pension are among the important initiatives that are aimed at making development truly

inclusive. Over 15 crore Jan Dhan accounts have been opened in just six months. The

insurance scheme for accidental deaths, launched on May 9, with a low premium of Rs.

12, has got 5.57 crore policyholders in a very short span of time. Life insurance schemes

for a premium of Rs. 330 per year found 1.7 crore takers in the first 18 days. About 5.77

crore small and marginal entrepreneurs will get substantial help from MUDRA Bank.

The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, which I have inherited,

has taken initiatives to bridge the gap between the digital haves and have-nots through

the Digital India programme, aimed at reducing red-tapism and human interface in

providing services to citizens. To take the benefits of development beyond the cities and

to boost employment opportunities in small towns, we have approved a policy for call

centres in small towns. ‘Digital India’, ‘Skill India’ and ‘Make in India’ are all being

executed in mission mode, and will change the face of the country.

This is especially significant as the Ministry has been in the news for all the wrong

reasons for the past several years. Rampant corruption had become its hallmark during

the Congress government. We accepted the challenge to revive the Ministry and make it

one of the most vibrant and growth-oriented ones in the government.

BSNL, which made a profit of more than Rs. 10,000 crore in 2004, was suffering a loss of

Rs. 7,000 crore in 2014. It has now embarked on a path of growth by setting up new

infrastructure and providing new services with a special focus on the Northeast and on

Left Wing Extremist affected areas. The Department of Post has today become the most

effective vehicle for financial inclusion in the more remote corners. Riding on the e-

commerce revolution, India Post is all set to become the largest logistics service provider

and will take e-commerce to rural areas.

The ambitious plan to lay 7 lakh kilometres of optical fibre network, connecting all 2.5

lakh village panchayats, is not only the world’s largest broadband highway project, but

also aims to empower citizens through IT. Our efforts to improve the quality of life for the

common man has acquired a new dimension under the Digital India programme. Mr.

Modi’s call to provide government services on mobiles has started becoming a reality with

services such as Jeevan Pramaan and the digital locker. The My Gov portal has

successfully made the common man a partner in government. JAM (Jan Dhan Yojana,

Aadhar, Mobile) is aimed at ensuring easy delivery of entitlements such as pension and

subsidies to citizens through technology.

To ensure success of ‘Make in India’, electronics manufacturing has been given a big

boost. About 21 manufacturing clusters have been approved across India with incentive

schemes. Proposals worth Rs. 20,000 crore have been received, of which proposals worth

Rs. 9,000 crore have been approved.

Vigour in foreign policy

The success of Mr. Modi in providing a renewed vigour to Indian diplomacy and foreign

policy is unprecedented. Be it India’s neighbours or the G-20 nations, India’s prestige,

moral authority and extraordinary potential for growth is being recognised world over.

Under the dynamic leadership of the Prime Minister, the world stands convinced about

the bright prospects of India’s growth initiatives. The growing role of India as an

emerging global power is being recognised.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi, India has become a country of hope. There

is no gloom and despair, no apprehension of rent-seeking. This, certainly, is an assurance

of a promising future.

(Ravi Shankar Prasad is the Union Minister of Communications and Information

Technology.)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 24, 2015

Promises unmet

KAPIL SIBAL

Mr. Modi sold promises and dreams during his campaign speeches but the reality has been vastly different.

Narendra Modi believes he has transformed India in the last

one year. In his speeches abroad, especially to NRIs, he has

repeatedly made this point, though he chooses not to do so in

India. Mr. Modi catapulted to the position of Prime Minister

by selling a dream of bringing succour to the lives of the

marginalised millions. At the end of one year, we need to assess the transformation he

promised.

Business as usual

Mr. Modi promised that when he came to power, the economy would grow at 10 per cent

or more. He promised to put in place procedures to ensure ease of doing business. After

one year, it is business as usual.

In fact, a recent study reveals that profitability of 2,941 major companies in the quarter

ending December 2014 declined by 16.9 per cent compared to the corresponding quarter

of the previous year. Indeed, key drivers of corporate profitability, namely investment,

household consumption and corporate dividends, continue to be weak. Many analysts

have in fact downgraded the earnings forecast all the way till March 2016.

Latest figures from the Finance Ministry (March 2015) indicate that 2,099 mega projects

involving an outlay of 18.13 lakh crore are stalled with the Project Management Group

directly under the control of the Prime Minister. The government’s claim about reversal

in the economic fortunes of India is hollow. It is because of the abysmal performance of

the corporate sector and the nonprofessional way in which state-owned banks give loans

that PSU banks are deeply crisis ridden with bad loans and restricted assets reaching a

gigantic Rs. 7,12,000 crore (13.2 per cent of total advances), a figure higher than our

fiscal deficit. Mr. Modi, instead of making outlandish statements beyond our borders,

should focus on, or at least have his Finance Minister deal with, the reality of economic

stagflation that is bleeding us.

Before the elections when inflation was a real problem, Mr. Modi continuously

proclaimed that when in power, he would ensure inflation was controlled and households

did not struggle. His government was fortunate to see the crude oil price fall. From $108

a barrel in May 2014, it is now $60. This helped the Finance Minister reduce the deficit

and the wholesale price index came down. Unfortunately, the inflation that touches the

aam aadmi was not addressed. The average price of select items consumed daily by

people is higher today than a year ago. The price per kilo of wheat flour, pulses, milk,

mustard oil, vanaspati, onions and potatoes has increased, in some cases by 1015 per

cent. In September 2013, when the rupee depreciated to Rs. 66 a dollar, Mr. Modi had

said, “[Due to] the failure of Manmohan Singh, the rupee has landed in hospital, where it

is battling for life on a ventilator.” Today, it continues to be on a ventilator, hovering

around Rs. 64 to a dollar.

Mr. Modi made promises knowing that fulfilling them would be a tall order. Amit Shah

has now admitted that the vow to bring back billions of dollars of black money was just a

chunavi jumla (electoral gimmick). Statements like these shake people’s confidence in the

credibility of politicians. There are huge procedural wrangles in bringing back black

money. The promise to put Rs. 15 lakh in every citizen’s bank account from the recovered

black money was an unethical and dishonest attempt to garner votes. Now that they are

in government, both the Finance Minister and Mr. Modi realise the difficulties and no

longer talk about it.

Mr. Modi also promised to remove corruption. On April 21, 2014, he said he would

personally ensure the removal of criminals from Parliament. We are yet to see that

happen. In fact, the Lokpal Bill, an emotive issue that caught the attention of the people,

saw the BJP supporting the Aam Aadmi Party to up the ante against the United

Progressive Alliance. Now, the Prime Minister appears to have forgotten about it and is

even silent about its introduction in Parliament.

Foreign policy failures

Despite the hype, onground delivery is not visible here. Mr. Modi’s policy on Pakistan has

been a failure; he does not know how to deal with Pakistan. He would have us believe that

all is quiet despite the fact that incidences of crossborder intrusions have increased and

Nawaz Sharif has expressed anguish and alleged that the Prime Minister has let him

down. There is no change on the ground and yet our Foreign Secretary went to Pakistan

in March under the garb of a SAARC meeting. No breakthroughs followed.

Mr. Modi recently returned from China. In his election campaign, he had said it was

shameful for the External Affairs Minister to go to China despite repeated Chinese

incursions across the border. The incursions continue, but Mr. Modi himself happily

visited China, despite the Chinese reaction to Mr. Modi’s Arunachal Pradesh tour in

February. On the issue of incursions, the Finance Minister said recently, “As far as China

is concerned, on the line of actual control, China has a different perception on what the

line of actual control is, India has a different perception.”

It seems that incursions by Chinese are no longer an issue, legitimised because the

perceptions of the two countries on the line of actual control are different. In China, Mr.

Modi unilaterally made a statement that evisas would be granted to Chinese tourists,

despite the Foreign Secretary stating the opposite a few hours earlier. Mr. Modi has lost a

great opportunity to use the evisa as a bargaining chip to settle our concerns qua

Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir.

As for the U.S., Mr. Modi suggests there has been a transformation in relations since

President Barack Obama accepted the invitation to be a Guest of Honour on Republic

Day. Relations between countries are not transformed through ceremonial visits. It is

only when Americans invest in our economy that the relationship will be considered

transformative. From the U.S. standpoint, road blocks to investments in India remain.

Unless bold policy decisions are taken, real transformation will not happen.

Social sector setback

The real failure of this government has been its complete disregard of the social sectors.

Agriculture, education, health, and the concerns of small traders, who represent the

backbone of the economy, have all been sidelined. Allocations on education and health

have been drastically reduced. Agriculture is in distress. The growth rate in agriculture

has come down to 1.1 per cent from 3.7 per cent in 2014. More farmers are committing

suicide than ever before. The average debt of 52 per cent of all agricultural households is

Rs. 47,000, of which 26 per cent is owed to private moneylenders — the root cause of

farmer suicides. There has been no attempt to have a crop insurance scheme. Mr. Modi

should know that 8085 per cent of all farmers own less than 1 hectare of land, which

means that land is their only source of livelihood. If they lose that, they will be deprived

of their livelihood and, in the absence of skills, they cannot be absorbed in non-

agricultural sectors. Therefore, the amendments to the Land Bill are ill-timed. This

legislation should only move forward when there is enough capacity created in the non-

agricultural sectors and enough skills imparted for surplus rural labour. It is clear,

therefore, that this government has no clue how to deal with the endemic problems that

confront the agricultural community. Mr. Modi is instead showering benefits on a few

industrialists, which is the worst form of crony capitalism.

There is also a sinister transformation taking place in India; a silent but surefooted

saffronising of both polity and institutions, particularly in education. This does not augur

well for our democracy. Vicious attempts by the saffron brigade to create conflicts

through ‘love jihad’ and ‘ghar vapasi’ are matters of deep concern. The essence of India

must be protected at any cost. The government by fair means and foul is attempting to

destroy what our civilisation has always stood for.

(Kapil Sibal is senior Congress leader and former Union Minister.)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 24, 2015

Pushing the envelope in foreign policy

SRINATH RAGHAVAN

Narendra Modi’s foreign policy has been continuous with that of his predecessors but he has also sought to push the boundaries of certain engagements much further.

Foreign policy is all about securing permanent interests. As such,

it may be best judged in the long run. Nevertheless, since foreign

policy has been so prominent during the government’s first year in

office, an interim assessment may be useful. What are the areas of

continuity and change, the successes and blind spots?

Since the early 1990s, the overarching goal of our foreign policy has been a stable and

conducive external environment for India’s internal economic transformation and a

larger international profile. Towards these ends, successive governments have sought

simultaneously to preserve India’s key security interests and to deepen its ties with the

global economy. From this standpoint, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign

policy has been continuous with that of his predecessors. Yet, Mr. Modi has also sought to

push the boundaries of certain engagements much further. This is not just a question

giving a fresh vim to foreign policy, although the vigour is palpable.

The U.S. and China

Consider his approach to dealing with the two most important powers: the United States

and China. For over two decades now, every Indian government has tried to impart more

substance to relations with these countries. Even as New Delhi has moved steadily to

forge strategic ties with Washington, it has sought to place its relations with Beijing on an

even keel. However, Mr. Modi has been exceptionally clear in articulating India’s

interests and trying to leverage the relationship with the U.S. and China. Thus, during

U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to India in January 2015, India issued a separate

joint statement on security in the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean. And on Mr. Modi’s trip

to China this month, a separate joint statement was issued on climate change in the light

of the upcoming conference in Paris. In both cases, there may be a gap between rhetoric

and reality. Still, Mr. Modi is clearly attempting to push the envelope and advance India’s

interests without making binary choices in its engagement with these countries.

In South Asia

Closer home, he has consistently outlined a vision of shared prosperity for South Asia and

has credibly projected Indian leadership in the region. His visits to Nepal, in August

2014, and Sri Lanka, in March 2015, have gone a long way in helping reset relations with

both these countries. Similarly, his decision to abandon the Bharatiya Janata Party’s

stance and ratify the Land Border Agreement with Bangladesh has given a shot in arm to

the bilateral relationship. Yet, the real challenges lie ahead of him. The earthquake in

Nepal will certainly delay — and may even complicate — the arduous task of drawing up

an agreed constitution. India will not only have to prepare for longer-term assistance in

reconstruction, but will also have to engage Nepalese parties more proactively to prevent

the political process from drifting. In Sri Lanka, the present government has rolled back

the worst features of the presidential system. It has also moved to return the land

acquired by the security forces, including in the Tamil areas. But it remains to be seen if

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena is open to a political settlement with the

Tamils. After all, his own base includes a slice of the Sinhala chauvinists. In any event, the

Tamil question remains a potentially thorny issue in bilateral relations. Colombo’s

relationship with Beijing is another sensitive area. On campaign trail, Mr. Sirisena had

spoken out against his predecessor, Mahinda Rajapaksa’s tilt towards China. In office, he

has struck a more equivocal note. This is hardly surprising given China’s economic

importance to Sri Lanka — ties that will deepen further with China’s plans for a maritime

silk route.

During his forthcoming trip to Dhaka, in the first week of June, Mr. Modi will

undoubtedly seek to capitalise on the boundary agreement. Bangladesh also seems open

to improve transportation and transit links with India. So far, New Delhi’s inability to

deliver on an agreement on Teesta river waters had led Dhaka to hold back on transit

arrangements. It is unlikely that Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will execute a

complete volte-face and fall in with India’s requirements. Yet, growing international

pressure on her government may make her more amenable to Indian interests. New Delhi

has done well to stand by Ms. Hasina in the face of the ongoing onslaught by the

Islamists. Yet India must also be mindful of the problem of being identified solely with

the Awami League. A stable two-party democracy in Bangladesh is in India’s long-term

interests.

The Pakistan question

As ever, the sharpest challenge for India’s regional ambitions comes from Pakistan.

Despite getting off to a good start with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Mr. Modi has been

unable to craft a coherent and consistent approach to dealing with Pakistan. Like his

predecessors, he has swung from engagement to disengagement — only to be forced to

pick up the diplomatic pieces and return to the table. There is something curious about

India’s policy towards Pakistan, which consists of doing the same thing over and over

again and expecting a different result. Mr. Modi has to break this mould. Diplomatic

engagement should not be seen as a reward for Pakistan’s good behaviour. The

symbolism of diplomacy should be reduced — even if substantive progress remains tough

to achieve.

The current impasse with Pakistan also impinges on our ties with Afghanistan. Here, Mr.

Modi faces a situation that has turned rather unfavourable from New Delhi’s perspective.

Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani’s attempt to cosy up to Pakistan has led to an

inevitable downgrading of ties with India. Whether or not this yields results, India has to

ensure that its interests in Afghanistan are not placed on the chopping block. China’s

backing for reconciliation with the Taliban will further complicate India’s position on

Afghanistan. Unless New Delhi adopts a clear strategy, Mr. Modi may well find himself

presiding over a retrenchment in Indian engagement with Afghanistan.

While the overall record in South Asia has been mixed, there has been a startling lack of

focus on our extended neighbourhood to the west. Even as West Asia is roiled by a range

of conflicts, the government has remained content with mounting rescue missions for

Indians living in trouble spots. This policy will prove unsustainable if instability deepens

and widens in West Asia: some seven million Indians live in the Gulf countries. India

needs to position itself as a force for stability in the region, which in turn will require

enormous diplomatic engagement. So far, the government has proved purblind on West

Asia.

Part of the problem is the persisting flaws in the institutional set-up on foreign policy and

security. Despite considerable centralisation in the Prime Minister’s Office, the silos

between various ministries seem intact. The lack of functional integration of expertise is

evident in several areas. Think of the ill-considered decision to purchase 36 Rafale fighter

jets. The Defence Minister is still unable to explain how the remaining 90 aircrafts will be

procured — if at all. The inability to grasp the import of mega regional trade pacts being

negotiated under American leadership is another case in point. The Ministry of

Commerce has done little more than set up a company to invest in countries like

Vietnam—hoping thereby to secure access to other markets if the Trans-Pacific

Partnership goes through. There is still no indication of a strategic response to attempts

by leading industrial economies to change the rules of world trade. The government’s

stance on Intellectual Property Rights in yet another example. Conflicting statements

issued by the government have unnecessarily put India on the defensive.

Fine-tuning the institutional support for foreign and strategic policy is imperative to

following through on the early successes as well as addressing various gaps. Recall that

the first United Progressive Alliance government chalked up rather more impressive

accomplishment after just over a year in office: the joint statement with the U.S. on the

nuclear deal and the agreement on parameters for settling the boundary with China. The

challenge is to sustain focus and momentum in the tougher years that lie ahead.

(Srinath Raghavan is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research.)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 25, 2015

Best poised to deliver results

SUHASINI HAIDAR

Mr. Modi has been proactive and successful in foreign relations but has stalled in Pakistan. It is time he scripted a new narrative.

In the one year of his government, Prime Minister Narendra

Modi’s travels to five continents have been marked by one

common motif: that he is on the front foot. To borrow a phrase,

he has boldly gone where many PMs have not gone before, with

a first visit to Mongolia, and the first stand-alone visits to Sri

Lanka, Canada, Fiji, and the Seychelles in decades. The

government has taken up challenges abroad and pursued them

unequivocally despite the possible backlash domestically:

ratifying the Land Boundary agreement with Bangladesh, pressing ahead with the nuclear

deal with the U.S., the announcement of defence buys in Paris, disregarding the security

establishment by offering e-visas to China, and several other steps. However, Mr. Modi’s

dealings with Pakistan are the one exception to his otherwise proactive style. With

Pakistan, the NDA government has appeared indecisive and risk-averse, in sharp contrast

to Mr. Modi’s first bold move of inviting Mr. Sharif to his swearing-in ceremony a year

ago.

Limited engagement

At the time, the invitation to Mr. Sharif had been hailed as a ‘masterstroke’, but the

strokes played since have puzzled many in both Islamabad and in New Delhi, including

the government’s supporters. Thus, while the government drew red lines around the

Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit’s meeting with the Hurriyat ahead of the

Foreign Secretary talks in August, it failed to follow through when he met them in March

this year. While Mr. Modi and Mr. Sharif exchanged gifts for their mothers, an obviously

intimate gesture, the warmth didn’t translate into the bilateral process. While India and

Pakistan saved each other’s citizens in Yemen, they didn’t come any closer as a result.

Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar went to Islamabad to talk, but didn’t engage in any

substantive way, and while Mr. Modi has dialled Mr. Sharif on at least three occasions, on

the two occasions when they have been in the same city, even in the same room — New

York for the UNGA and Kathmandu for SAARC — they have not held any formal talks.

The two leaders may be afforded another opportunity in July, as both are expected to be

in Russia’s Ufa city for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit.

Eventually though, evented meetings and “talks for the sake of talks” aren’t a substitute

for policy, and Mr. Modi alone cannot be expected to take the entire blame or credit for

the relationship. The policy undertaken by the government in 2014 has in effect become

what India’s default position has been since the 2008 Mumbai attacks: a limited

engagement without a defined process. As a result, it seems to have no desired outcomes

other than avoiding another Mumbai, which in itself is a defensive position. The

initiatives discussed last year, in terms of trade, power supplies, and increased visas for

businessmen remain proposals for a time when the countries move out of this phase.

Explaining the stasis

Is there a point, as many within our government argue, to the present stasis in ties

between India and Pakistan? After all, while infiltration and Pakistan-sponsored terror

activity remain a concern, it would seem that those able to control terror groups within

the establishment have been deterred from planning another attack all this time. Second,

not talking to Pakistan until it shows results on terror keeps the pressure on the Sharif

government to deliver on justice in the Mumbai 26/11 attacks. Third, at a time when the

world is grappling with IS terror, a sharp focus on Pakistan’s terror activities will ‘isolate’

it diplomatically from others who are fighting jihadi terror like the U.S. and China.

Fourth, while government to government engagement is at a standstill, India “stands

with the people of Pakistan”, as both the PM and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval

have said in the past year, and that will pay off in goodwill inside Pakistan. All these

arguments are given by those inside the government who work on diplomatic policy with

Pakistan.

Unfortunately, not the least because Pakistan works in counter-intuitive ways itself, none

of the above has been borne out on the ground in the past year. Terror networks, both

those supported by the Pakistani state like LeT and JeM, and those fighting the state,

including the TTP and now even IS, continue to thrive, giving no indication that India is

any safer today for the lack of engagement. Second, the “pressure” on the Sharif

government has worn thin, and the case against the Mumbai attackers has never seemed

more tenuous, with bail for Zaki Ur Rahman Lakhvi and complete freedom granted to

Hafiz Saeed. Meanwhile, despite Pakistan’s actions and its blatant disregard of David

Headley’s corroboration of the case against Hafiz Saeed as detailed again in a memoir,

the world is far from holding it to account. Days after Mr. Barack Obama’s visit to India in

January, his government proposed a sixfold increase in military aid ($265 million in FMF

or foreign military financing) to Pakistan, and a total aid outlay of $1 billion for the year.

China has announced a $46 billion package to build Pakistan’s infrastructure, and even

India’s oldest friend Russia has offered military exercises and helicopters to Pakistan.

What’s more dangerous perhaps is the U-turn by Afghanistan, which has backed India for

years against the terror groups that threaten them both. Last week’s revelation of a joint

counter-terrorism MoU between Afghanistan’s intelligence agency NDS and the ISI will

deeply impact India’s defences, not the least in Kabul, where four Indians were killed in

an attack possibly meant to target the Indian ambassador. President Ghani, who

spearheaded the MoU within weeks of returning from meeting Mr. Modi, could hardly

have taken such a drastic step without American support.

Finally, the absence of government to government engagement and the PM and NSA’s

comments are not being allowed to percolate to the ground in Pakistan to produce the

desired goodwill: Pakistani TV channels run more repeats of Mr. Doval’s speech from

February 2014 where he explained his “offensive defence” strategy as “if you do one

Mumbai, you may lose Balochistan”, while for the first time in decades, the Pakistan

government has tried to blame RAW for heinous massacres in Peshawar and Karachi.

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar’s recent comments on “targeted killings” in Jammu

and Kashmir and using “terrorists to kill terrorists” will only serve more grist to

Rawalpindi’s propaganda mill.

Moving forward

None of these disappointing developments of the past year, however, should discourage

Mr. Modi. Instead, they underline the need for him to take the narrative of India-Pakistan

ties back into his hands. It is now time to prepare the country for the long-term vision he

hopes to implement.

He has no need to reinvent the wheel, but can pick up from where so many of his

predecessors left off. Each of them may have tried and failed to resolve issues, or to deter

those in Pakistan who wish India harm, but they left indelible stamps on the process:

Inder Kumar Gujral gave us the neighbourhood doctrine and the composite dialogue;

Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Lahore declaration is considered a template along with the Simla

pact for diplomatic dealings; while Manmohan Singh’s four-step formula on Kashmir

remains the only solution theoretically acceptable to all sides. Mr. Modi has what none of

the others possessed: a clear mandate, an uncritical Cabinet with no coalition

compulsions or threat from the opposition. He has shown, as he did with the Bangladesh

agreement and China engagement, that he is able to curb the most extremist views on

relations with neighbours. It is a moment in Indian history that even the Pakistani

government should be able to recognise as unique, and Mr. Modi is best poised to deliver

the promise.

suhasini.h@thehindu.co.in

This article was published in The Hindu on May 25, 2015

Editorial: That missing vigour

Going by macro-numbers, the Narendra Modi government has a

lot to cheer as it enters its second year. Falling deficit both on the

current account and fiscal fronts, and rising foreign exchange

reserves should be cause for relief, even rejoicing. Both core and

retail inflation rates have eased, prompting the Reserve Bank of

India to cut repo rates twice this year. Reading these trends in

tandem with the rise in indirect tax collections and a marginal

drop in the levels of non-performing assets, a confident Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley,

suggested last week that better days are really round the corner. There have also been

significant reform initiatives in the area of foreign direct investment covering sectors

such as insurance, defence, railways and construction. Labour law reforms and relaxation

of rules for investment by new categories of Indians living abroad have all been quietly

pushed through amid the daily din in Parliament. The successful auctioning of coal mine

leases and spectrum, thereby setting the stage for a transparent policy regime, is

noteworthy. However, the government’s inability to push two crucial pieces of legislation

— the land bill and the GST bill — has reflected poorly on its legislative management

skills. This has also revealed an unhealthy, ‘my-way-only’ attitude in a democratic set-up.

Despite all the positives, there is this sense of restlessness perceptible on the ground.

While largely conceding this, Mr. Jaitley has sought to explain it away, attributing any

such impatience to the fact that “the country wants to grow even faster”. But is there

anything wrong in people pitching their aspirations high? Expectations rose several

notches especially after Mr. Modi pegged a high-voltage poll campaign on an allegedly

‘non-performing’ United Progressive Alliance government led by Dr. Manmohan Singh.

While claiming that the “expectations from the Modi government were realistic”, Mr.

Jaitley has put the blame on a recalcitrant Opposition, which, according to him, has put

many a roadblock before the government’s efforts to fulfil its mandate. In fact, he has

given his own government a pat on the back for being decisive in the face of

obstructionism. But the moot point is this: Why is it that great expectations have so

quickly given way to a feeling of impatience, all within the span of a year? The positive

sentiment is slowly evaporating. Pick-up in domestic demand and a recovery in the

investment cycle are not happening. The ‘X-Factor’ is just not there, as one industrialist

put it. An answer to this situation could lie in an initiative that would see the government

taking the lead-spender role, kick-starting an economy in slumber. A little bit of

socialistic spending is a necessity given the size and structure of the Indian economy.

This article was published in The Hindu on May 25, 2015

Decisive but to what avail?

ASHOK K. MEHTA

Surprisingly for a nationalist party-led government, national security and defence have occupied scant space while showcasing its achievements.

On May 26, 2015, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National

Democratic Alliance (NDA) government completes a year of

governance. Surprisingly for a nationalist party-led government,

national security and defence have occupied scant space while

showcasing its achievements. On hindsight, perhaps rightly so,

because a lot more could have been done after United

Progressive Alliance rule where its Defence Minister A.K.

Antony’s sole objective was to prevent scams and follow a policy of “do-little”.

Under the NDA, one has to look at defence from the initial tenure of Finance Minister

Arun Jaitley having additional charge of defence, which was not a good idea, to it being

given to Manohar Parrikar. Once embedded in South Block, all eyes were on Mr. Parrikar

who said that his speciality was quick decision-making not realising that the office of

Chief Minister of Goa is a far cry from the complex intricacies of managing the country’s

defence. Last week, in one of the many conclaves celebrating 365 days of the government,

BJP president Amit Shah was heard saying that when compared to the UPA government

which submitted to Pakistani firing on the Line of Control (LoC), the NDA government’s

response to such aggression has been more robust and muscular: bomb for bullet and

other stirring similes. However, this reflects a distorted understanding among the

political class of the dynamics of the LoC.

Some positive thinking

In contrast, Mr. Parrikar appears to be thinking out of the box; at another conclave, he

suggested that “we have to neutralise terrorists through terrorists only. Why can’t we do

it? We should do it. Why does my soldier have to do it?” He is probably and indiscreetly

mixing up covert operations with Ikhwanis(counterinsurgents) who are made up of

surrendered terrorists who were unsuccessfully employed earlier to fight infiltrators and

resident terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistani and local terrorists not only inhabit

the State but also regularly make infiltrations to keep the pot boiling,

employingfidayeen attacks, using improvised explosive devices and carrying out

ambushes causing casualties to soldiers and civilians. In 2014, the Army killed 110

terrorists on our side of the LoC.

Mr. Parrikar may not have been fully briefed of past operations; still, his idea has to be

extended by putting in use a plan that was given in 2003 to then Defence Minister George

Fernandes to do precisely what Mr. Parrikar has in mind and more, i.e. covert operations

to deter cross-border terrorism. A lack of political will led to that plan being abandoned.

When Gen. V.K. Singh, now Union Minister of State (Statistics and Programme

Implementation, External Affairs and Overseas Indian Affairs) was the Indian Army

Chief, he had belatedly raised a special operations wing, Technical Support Division

(TSD), which was prematurely discovered and disbanded when Gen. Singh confronted

the government over his age issue. The TSD did some useful work across borders as the

inquiry by the Army later revealed.

On Pakistan

Speaking in Mumbai in January after releasing the Hindi weekly, Vivek’s special issue on

national security, Mr. Parrikar described Pakistan’s clandestine activities which saw a

dramatic operation in the Arabian Sea where an Indian Coast Guard ship intercepted a

“suspect” Pakistan fishing boat on the night on December 31 near the maritime boundary

of the two countries, some 365 kilometres from Porbandar in Gujarat and lamented that

“some former Prime Ministers had compromised the country’s deep assets”. The allusion

was obviously to Prime Minister I.K. Gujral who had ordered the dismantling of strategic

assets created inside Pakistan over many decades.

Employing unconventional operations and recreating deep assets implies creating tactical

and strategic assets that are usable on both sides of the LoC/International Border which

will impose deterrent costs. This is an idea whose time is long overdue. For example, the

Israelis were able to halt suicide killings during the second Intifada by intelligence-driven

targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders and potential human bombers. They would

intercept them between their leaving the hideout en route to the designated target.

In May 5, following a meeting of Corps Commanders in Rawalpindi, Pakistan’s Inter

Services Public Relations (ISPR) issued a press release accusing the Research and

Analysis Wing (RAW) of stirring the pot in Balochistan, helping the Tehreek-e-Taliban

Pakistan (TTP) in Afghanistan and fuelling the recent skirmishes in Karachi including the

killing of Ismaili Shias. If RAW is doing an iota of what it is being accused of, it indicates

that “deep assets” are being gradually reinstalled and that these are hurting Pakistan.

Reviving a post

Mr. Parrikar’s other positive but less embarrassing step is the resurrection of the post of

the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) after the file was buried for posterity by his predecessor

in the previous government. The former National Security Advisor, Shiv Shankar Menon,

said that after the Naresh Chandra Task Force had recommended creating an equivalent

of the CDS in 2012 and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had endorsed it, Mr. Antony

would not comply: “he would not listen to the PM”.

It would appear that Mr. Parrikar’s big bang announcements are made only during

conclaves. In March this year, in response to a question on the CDS, he said that he was

“working on a mechanism” for the creation of a post for effective integration of the three

services and that a note would be sent in the next two to three months to the Cabinet

Committee on Security. He has also announced that the new Defence Research and

Development Organization (DRDO) chief and Scientific Advisor would be appointed by

the end of this month. Therefore, have ‘achhe din’ started for the Ministry of Defence?

Probably not.

Modernisation and capital

The government claims credit for clearing defence acquisition projects worth Rs.1 lakh

crore but few contracts are likely to be signed. The reasons why these will not materialise

any time soon are the long-delayed revised but complex Defence Procurement Procedures

including offsets; a lack of clarity on ‘Make in India’, and a paucity of funds for defence

modernisation though Mr. Parrikar insisted at the conclave that there were sufficient

funds. However, Defence Secretary R.K. Mathur told the Parliamentary Standing

Committee on Defence last month that not only was the Ministry unable to use its

allocated capital budget but that it was insufficient. He added that capital funds must be

allocated to maintain the 30:40:30 ratio in the quality of military equipment — 30 per

cent for state-of-the-art equipment, 40 per cent for current holdings and 30 per cent for

equipment moving into obsolescence. Last year, Rs.6,630 crore of capital was returned

unused, presumably ordered to be returned, which is an annual ritual for balancing the

fiscal deficit. This year, Rs.6,070 crore has been allocated for “new items” while Rs.71,336

crore will go towards previously committed liabilities. Rs.6,070 crore is a paltry amount

for modernisation. This year’s defence budget is the lowest for many years.

In order to create money for modernisation, Mr.Parrikar has innovatively used the

guillotine by excising the Rafale fighter aircraft deal from 126 to 36 fighters and has saved

Rs.65,000 crore from the original cost of Rs.90,000 crore. Similarly, by freezing the

raising of the Mountain Strike Corps (MSC), he has stalled strategic deterrence against

China. Mr.Parrikar’s unconventional alterations of capability development reflects ad

hocism and a lack of integration in the planning process. It also shows that Service Chiefs

can be easily browbeaten to cut their operational programmes; worse still is that these

programmes haven’t been thought through by the services.

This is bound to lead to inevitable improvisations and half-measured capability building.

Notwithstanding Mr. Parrikar’s carry-over compulsions, he must find a better method of

budgeting for wise spending and raising the political pitch for enhanced allocations to

meet the challenges of a two-front scenario. For now, the conventional deterrence against

China is on hold — so much for bridging the capability gap.

Defence management

In a rare public outburst last week, Mr. A.K. Antony criticised the government by raising

several questions over the Rafale deal, wondering whether the Finance Ministry and the

Defence Acquisition Council were taken on board while clinching the agreement with

France. At the briefing, he also tore into government claims on defence preparedness

accusing it of committing the “anti-national act” of compromising the nation’s security by

downsizing the MSC on the Chinese border. “A weak man cannot safeguard national

interests. We don’t want war, but should be in a position to protect our country,” he said,

appealing to the government to reconsider the decision and which was also a reflection of

the erratic planning and budgeting process. This raises serious questions about higher

defence management and nails the original blunder in the government’s Rules of

Business that arrogates to the Defence Secretary the responsibility for the defence of

India. No Defence Secretary has ever been held accountable: not for the 1962 war with

China, Kargil or the outstanding disparity in defence preparedness between China and

India.

The civil service is the biggest impediment for defence reform as such a move will

diminish its status and importance in the civil-military calculus. Mr. Parrikar must

rebalance this equation.

Other than some positive ideas, there is little to celebrate in defence. especially as Mr.

Parrikar’s well-intentioned expertise in decision-making is being questioned.

(Gen. Ashok. K. Mehta is a founder member of the erstwhile Defence Planning Staff of

the Chiefs of Staff Committee in the Ministry of Defence.)

This article was published in The Hindu on May 26, 2015

Editorial: Not up to expectations... Having come to power on the strength of mega-promises centred

on the prospect of achhe din for all, Prime Minister Narendra

Modi cannot but feel the weight of popular expectations on his

government after an uneventful first year. The vast majority of

those who backed him, those who gave the BJP he led a clear

mandate in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, bought his words of

hope in toto, and believed he could bring in much-needed change

and put the country back on a trajectory of growth and development. On the first

anniversary, some of the promises remain as proposals and many others appear too

remote with little or no chance of coming to fruition in the next four years. Given the state

of India’s slow-moving bureaucracy the expectations were perhaps unrealistic to begin

with, but Mr. Modi had fed them with election-time rhetoric.

From ensuring efficient delivery of basic services and quickening clearance for

infrastructure and industrial projects to ending corruption and bringing back black

money kept in foreign banks, his was a long and exhaustive list of promises. As the

previous Congress-led government ended its term entwined in scams and scandals, Mr.

Modi marketed himself as everything his predecessor Manmohan Singh was not, and

sought to represent the varied aspirations of whole classes of people. He wanted to offer

much more than a concrete programme of action; he wanted to present a vision of the

future, a vision of India taking its place as an economic superpower in the first world. Of

course, it was not as if nothing got done during the year, but the achievements pale in

relation to the expectations. Inevitably, the comparison being made is not between the

last year of the Manmohan Singh government and the first year of the Modi government,

but between Mr. Modi’s words and his deeds, between the promise of achhe din and the

harsh, unchanging realities on the ground.

To the government’s credit, inflation is down. Falling international oil prices might have

had a role as also the resoluteness of the Reserve Bank of India in not lowering interest

rates, but the government kept a close watch on food prices. The push toward financial

inclusion through the Jan Dhan Yojana seems to have yielded quick results with crores of

poor people induced to open a bank account for the first time in their lives. This is quite

unlike the proposal for smart cities and the Make in India project that have had no

substantial results to show for all their potential, and haven’t so far made any tangible

change in the lives of ordinary people. Not surprisingly, the government appears to be

aware of this shortcoming and is preparing to announce a large-scale social sector

scheme. In contrast to the lack of forward movement in social welfare programmes in the

last one year, the government looked as if it were in a hurry to accommodate big business

by seeking to dilute the safeguards in the land acquisition legislation and extending tax

benefits to the rich. While it was not enthusiastic about the previous government’s rural

employment guarantee and food security schemes, it took up in all earnest the

controversy-ridden Aadhaar scheme, seen as a first step towards targeted social benefits

and capped subsidies. Instead of laying claim to a pro-growth label, the government

found itself trying to fend off an anti-poor tag. All told and added up on the political

ledger, the debit column has certainly ended up being longer than the credit column.

This article was published in The Hindu on May 26, 2015

Editorial: … yet successful abroad

Foreign policy initiatives and efforts to raise India’s international

profile will be clearly seen as prominent features of the year. Mr.

Modi’s visits to 18 countries in the West, Latin America, China, the

neighbourhood and East Asia were in line with the foreign policy

objectives set during the UPA’s tenure that sought to adapt India

to a fast-changing, multipolar world. In line with the UPA’s

correctives during its second tenure when the government sought

to move away from a single-minded focus on Indo-U.S. relations, the Modi regime has

adopted a multifaceted approach. The government has simultaneously pursued Indo-U.S.

strategic ties and a strong economic relationship with China based on trade and

investment. The former was outlined in the Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and

the Indian Ocean region signed during President Barack Obama’s visit when he was the

guest of honour at the Republic Day parade in New Delhi. Reciprocal state visits by Mr.

Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping allowed for incremental gains in the relationship

as both have sought to whittle down strategic differences.

Mr. Modi’s government has played a proactive role in the neighbourhood. Without the

coalition constraints that the UPA faced, the Modi government managed to conclude a

land agreement with Bangladesh. The government helped Nepal find its feet after the

earthquake and promised support for its Constitution-writing process without any

interference. Indeed, Mr. Modi’s twin visits to Nepal helped refurbish the image of the

foreign policy establishment, which had resorted to an interventionist approach under

the UPA midway through its tenure. But as regards Pakistan and the north-west region,

India’s foreign policy approach has been found wanting. The emphasis on a limited

engagement with Pakistan that has persisted since the 26/11 attacks has impeded

movement to solve outstanding issues, even as Islamabad has moved to deepen

cooperation with the new regime in Afghanistan. All said, it is an encouraging start on the

foreign policy front. And it is a matter of credit to the Prime Minister and the External

Affairs Minister that the Nehruvian emphasis on strategic autonomy has been retained.

This article was published in The Hindu on May 26, 2015