“When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” said Yogi Berra, the legendary catcher for the New York Yankees, who died on Tuesday 

Funny that may be, but not for Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he flies to New York at the start of a week-long visit to both U.S. coasts. 

Modi has come to quite a few forks in his road as he coaxes his people to­wards a prosperous, developed future. It is not at all an easy task. Often, for every piece of good news on India, there are nearly always a few setbacks or hurdles. Sometimes too much time is wasted on needless, diversionary controversies. Travelling overseas must seem like valuable time outside looking in. 

During his U.S. trip, Modi will meet large number of Fortune 500 CEOs as well as investors and start-up entre­preneurs in Silicon Valley. On Tuesday foreign minister Sushma Swaraj said, “The business of diplo­macy in India’s present government is business.” Modi and his senior minis­ters have been at pains to reassure American business that it is welcome in India, and Swaraj told the U.S.-India Business Council that New Delhi was determined to use technology innova­tion and research to leapfrog “some of the physical infrastructural con­straints”. It was the same message that Finance Minister Arun Jaitley kept repeating during a trip earlier this week to Singapore and Hong Kong. 

But is doing business in India getting any easier, and is foreign investment going to flood into infrastructure projects? The World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business report for 2015 says that India, in fact, slipped two notches to 142 out of 189 countries surveyed. Modi is likely to be quizzed about this on his U.S. visit. Yet, instead of con­cern and a serious resolve to get better very fast, several Indian states cele­brated their ranking in a separate World Bank-KPMG survey on their implementation of business reforms. Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan topped the rankings; the BJP rules all of them ex­cept for ally-run Andhra. The exulta­tion was understandable but a trifle premature: the survey said only 32 per cent of reforms had been implement­ed. 

The World Bank’s Onno Ruhl, in his foreword to the report on Indian re­forms, noted that it is still very diffi­cult to do business here. India does not even feature in the top 100 countries on eight out of 10 indicators in the par­allel Doing Business survey. He said India ranked among the bottom 10 economies in the world on dealing with construction permits and enforc­ing contracts. “Thus, the need of the day is reform, and the reforms must be led by the Government at both Central and State levels,” Ruhl wrote. 

The states’ survey was at Modi’s be­hest; he is serious about measuring the success of his Make in India mis­sion. The size of the challenge is daunting. By 2020, India will be home to 1.35 billion people of whom 906 mil­lion will be of working age. Each one of them will need a job. 

Going into Silicon Valley, Modi can boast more than 15 million followers on Twitter, second among world lead­ers to Barack Obama, whom he will be meeting on the last day of his trip (Modi is nearly level with Shah Rukh Khan but still two million followers behind Amitabh Bachchan). On the 27th when he takes part in a townhall meeting at Facebook’s headquarters alongside Mark Zuckerberg, he may be asked why his government is trying to interfere with privacy and personal data while proclaiming that it is pas­sionate about Digital India. On Tuesday, the government was forced to withdraw a draft policy on data en­cryption which would have required all businesses and private citizens to open their emails and social-media messages to official scrutiny 

This came close on the heels of the government having to pedal back af­ter outrage over attempts to re-define net neutrality which guarantees un­fettered access to all users across the Internet. It coincides with attempts by other countries to try and police the oceans of data and communication swirling across the planet. Back in June, a UN Human Rights Council re­port called for legal protection to en­cryption and anonymity, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, whom Modi will be meet­ing in California, has said privacy is a fundamental right.

Internet and social media services were cut off in parts of Gujarat earlier this month to thwart the rising pro­tests by the Patidar community over caste reservations. Similar clamp­downs have occurred in Kashmir. It will also be embarrassing if Modi is asked at his session with Zuckerberg why India made so many government requests to Facebook for user data and content restrictions. Between July and December 2014, after Modi took of­fice, India made 5,473 requests for 7,281 user accounts. Facebook produced ‘some data’ in nearly 45 per cent of those cases and agreed to restrict content in 5,832 cases. These numbers far outstrip any other country in the world, except the United States. 

The row over encryption couldn’t have come at a worse time. Late last month about 120 leading academics, most of them Indian American, raised concerns about Modi’s Digital India plans. In a statement they said there was almost certain that “digital systems will be used to enhance sur­veillance and repress the constitution­ally-protected rights of citizens”. They also accused Modi of attacking academic freedom in India. In re­sponse, Modi’s supporters gathered more than 1,000 signatures from academia on an ‘Oppose Prejudice and Fear-Mongering’ petition, charg­ing that most scholars of South Asian studies in the U.S. were a discredited lot and had no business criticising the prime minister. 

Early this month, at a Hindu Buddhist conference on conflict avoid­ance and climate awareness, Modi made an interesting distinction be­tween philosophy and ideology. His philosophy is simple enough — it is a quest for contented, peaceful and in­clusive development. This is a reason­able goal. 

“The essence of philosophy is that it is not a closed thought, while ideology is a closed one. So, philosophy not only allows dialogue, but it is perpetual search of truth through dialogue,” Modi said.” So, ideologies which close the gates for dialogue have the propen­sity for violence while philosophy seeks to avoid it through dialogue.” 

Philosopher he may be, but Modi also must tackle the ideologues in his camp. Soon after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Pravin Togadia wrote in the Organiser, the mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, that it was time to punish Muslims who had more than two children to combat their ‘population jihad’, RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat had his own say call­ing for a ‘non-political’ committee to decide which sections of Indian socie­ty needed job and education quotas, and how much. 

This, just as campaigning heats up for the election in Bihar, where caste seems to drown out all talk of develop­ment or law and order. In an extraordi­nary rebuff of Bhagwat, its spiritual leader, the BJP issued a strongly worded statement that it opposed any second thoughts on reservations for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and Extremely Backward classes. Gives ‘one step forward, two steps backward’ a whole new meaning, doesn’t it? 

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