Can Modi balance populism and prudence as external risks mount? India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi likes taking big steps and does not shy away from wagering his political capital. But he squandered quite a bit of it with his November demonetization measures, which banned 500- and 1,000-rupee bank notes. Modi was widely expected to unveil…
India has crossed just one battle line, but many more lie ahead Political power grows out of the barrel of gun. More precisely, it grows from the air-to-air missiles mounted on an upgraded, but aging, MiG-21 Bison interceptor flown by the intrepid Wing Commander Abhimandan Vardhaman, who took on US-made Pakistani F16s on February 27.…
Politics was reduced to raucous pandering: if Modi’s speech was short of a clearer vision of New India, Rahul did not lay out a blueprint for a transfer of power either It says a lot about Narendra Modi’s absence of apprehension over Friday’s no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha that the same day the foreign…
The PM has adopted legacy programmes and run them better They say the best way to persuade somebody is to plant an idea in their head and get them to start speaking about it as if it were their idea. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown he is a great persuader. Persuasion is one thing.…
The prime minister’s speech at the World Economic Forum was sweeping and aspirational (one observer said he was “preaching to the choir”). He presented India as the most attractive investment destination in the world, with its democracy, its young population, its diversity and the headroom it has in catching up with the West’s levels of…
“Those who make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”-Voltaire Absurdity was piled atop absurdity as seven weeks of vitriol ended in a splash on Tuesday with Prime Minister Narendra Modi taking a seaplane ride. When this prime minister, arguably the most powerful mass leader we have had in a generation, breaks security rules,…
While waiting for the 10,400 policemen who were deployed this week to guard Ivanka Trump in Hyderabad to go back to their regular duties of guarding lesser VIPs, I pondered over the eternal “Where are we in history?” question. Ms. Trump’s speechwriters were savvy enough to avoid comment on the hordes of beggars who had…
There are some remarkable similarities—and dissimilarities—between Narendra Modi and Donald Trump. Both men ran insurgent presidential campaigns that upended conventional political structures (I use ‘presidential’ advisedly for Modi; does the Bharatiya Janata Party matter any longer to our prime minister, when all around us people refer to his government as ‘Modi sarkar’?). Both men were…
To be truly remembered in history books, Narendra Modi will have to parlay his interpersonal skill to work his way through his bucket list I don’t know how many people noticed this tweet from the Prime Minister’s Office on November 19: “External Affairs Minister@ Sushma Swaraj ji is present at Delhi airport to receive PM…
I am nagged by a disturbing question: how will historians compile the “collected works of Narendra Modi” when so many of his thoughts are so, well, instant? What better setting to join Instagram than Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar’s new capital, back-dropped by visuals of spectacular pagodas, with thousands of swooning followers now able to follow…
I should have titled this column “The Audacity of Hype”. Reading some of the speeches made at and around the Group of 20 summit in Brisbane, it almost sounded like a lovefest around joint action and joint reaction with the exception of Vladimir Putin, who was clearly the black sheep because of Russia’s incursions into…
The two men were born fourteen years and fourteen days apart. They died fourteen years apart, one just three years after independence. Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru were both London-educated lawyers. They both worked very closely with Mahatma Gandhi in the long fight for independence. Both went to prison several times. Both were involved in…
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is at his best when he is talking. He has been in office for 555 days and I wager that he has made at least three times that number of speeches, give or take the time that he spends travelling on Air India One. Modi’s personal website and that of the…
When our prime minister rode on horseback to the Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu last week, one swooning supporter could not contain himself and tweeted: “When I saw Modi on a white horse on way Maa Vaishno Devi the avatara of Kaliki (sic) flashed my mind. What a leadership”. Devout Hindus believe that we are…
Eight hundred and forty-five years ago, Henry II of England, chafing under a long and abrading rivalry with Thomas Becket, his former friend and the Archbishop of Canterbury, finally burst out in anger: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Four of Henry’s courtiers rushed out, accosted the archbishop in his cathedral, and…
I was chatting with my barber in Gurgaon when I realised that Narendra Modi and the hundreds of other politicians campaigning in the Haryana and Maharashtra assembly elections were not uttering the P word. Salman, the young hair-cutter, said he was the second of nine children of a sepoy in the Indian Army — the…
Thousands of grumpy bureaucrats are being forced to sacrifice a long weekend — there are too many of them anyway this year in India — and clean toilets on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi launches his Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Movement) by wielding a broom himself in a Delhi slum on…
Twice in the past four months, Narendra Modi has spoken with unalloyed pride and excitement as he stood among our super-achieving space scientists — at Sriharikota on June 30, and on Wednesday when the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrated the success of our Mars orbiter Mangalyaan. “History has been created today You have dared to…
Sometimes, when the late monsoon clouds hover low, India can be spied through the gloom, as if by happen-stance. So many geographies, languages, foods, cultures — and religions — thrown together higgledy-piggledy and powered by a sputtering nationalism that makes us want to be counted among the great powers of the world, rich, strong, and…
Over the past week, I have been struck by the helplessness of the men leading the world’s two biggest democracies. There is a major difference, though: President Barack Obama has tried, and failed, to change America’s gun control laws as one mass shooting is followed closely by another. After last week’s massacre at an Oregon…
Narendra Modi is a follower of Yogi Adityanath. On Twitter, that is. But the Mahant from Gorakhpur has no qualms about setting a tone that neither Modi nor his senior colleagues can publicly take. Why, while Modi basks in the afterglow of a series of foreign-policy successes, the yogi has seen fit to broadcast his…
I marked one hundred days of the Narendra Modi government by meeting four women called Usha Chaumar, Guddi Athwal, Annu Tamole and Sunita Chawaria who have travelled in just over a decade from the lowest rung of India’s caste ladder to a future that holds hope and optimism. Their lives and their stories were more…
In a striking exposition of what could be termed the Modi Doctrine, NSA Doval said if you are not able to exercise the power you possess because you don’t have the will, that is as good as not having it It is difficult to discern if Prime Minister Narendra Modi is beginning to lose his…
It is amusing, and not entirely surprising, that anybody sounding less than flattering of the Narendra Modi government is instantly suspected to be a member of a left-liberal pseudo-secular club of automated naysayers. There is, too, a newer class of dissidents, consisting either of frustrated right-wingers dismayed at either not partaking of the loaves and…
We are hopefully in the last of this summer’s dog days, and Sirius (or Svana as it is known in Hindu astrology) will glow a little less brilliantly in the hot night sky. Dog days are said to induce all sorts of mental upheaval, agitation, and unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why much of Europe wisely…
This weekend Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Nepal on his third foreign trip in ten weeks. By the end of September he will also have taken in Japan and the United States. Looming large on his itinerary will be China, which he visited four times as Gujarat’s chief minister in his quest for…
Round about this time, we ought to have been chilling our champagne and getting ready to exult in, and celebrate, a year of dramatic and positive change under the inspiring leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Vision, vim, vigour, and vitality should have been the keywords for Year One of the Modi Era. Yet the…
One of my prized possessions is a fossilised limpet, a kind of sea snail that attaches itself very, very tightly to rocks. The fossil must be hundreds of thousands of years old. It must have been prised off a rock with some force, the kind that is trying to get many of our privileged leaders…
One year ago, as voting got underway in our national elections, I titled my first column in this newspaper A Witch’s Brew’. That referred to the choices India’s voters had. Now we know that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has had to quaff quite a potent concoction since he rode to power. In equal parts, he…
The Narendra Modi government has been taking a few hard knocks. It learned that sweet talk in Maharashtra’s sugar belt, or at a gaudy wedding celebration in a dusty town in the Uttar Pradesh bad lands, is just that: in politics, your friends always have one eye cocked at a higher seat of power. Your…
There is a new sense of purposefulness in government. Many of the early steps Modi has taken reflect his Chief Executive Officer style in Gujarat. He does not believe in endless meetings and buck-passing. It seemed like the rhyming slogans, the election jingles, and the grandiloquence of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto were all that…
Damyata, datta, dayadhvam. “This very thing the heavenly voice of thunder repeats da, da, da, that is, control yourselves, give, be compassionate.” In the ancient Hindu text Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Prajapati or the creator is asked by his three-fold progeny — gods, men and demons —for advice, and he utters the syllable da three times. Self-control,…
The PMO website is taking on the busyness of Modi’s own website. Within hours of Munde’s death, the list of cabinet ministers was updated with a blank space next to the ministries of rural development… If you believe in signs and omens, all the days and dates this year coincide with 1947, our year of…
Arvind Kejriwal is the India Rubber Man. A Leo in politics if there is one, charismatic, mercurial, impetuous and likeable despite his foibles, he has re-invented himself time and again and rebounded into a new avatar. IIT trained engineer, IRS tax officer, Right to Information activist, anti-corruption crusader, and sidekick to Anna Hazare, Kejriwal couldn’t…
Long, long ago, before they invented news in 140 characters and we could remember our lives only through social media timelines, some of us believed it was possible to have our leaders display lofty politics and selfless diplomacy That is not true, of course. Politics and diplomacy both involve winning people over; in the end,…
One word summed up the five-week election: certitude. From the very beginning most of us were certain that the National Democratic Alliance would win power. It is fairly certain that the Congress party will suffer its worst defeat in 16 general elections. Over 300,000 kilometres, 440 rallies, 1,350 holograms, 4,000 chai pe charchas, and a…
Certainly not the growing number of people who believe that “free speech” means a loose mouth and the abuse of certain classes or communities. Imran Masood, Azam Khan and Mulayam Singh Yadav are not afraid of Narendra Modi. Nor is the swelling saffron sena if you believe Ram Rajya is about to dawn. In its…
This column will be published exactly ten months after Narendra Modi took office in the South Block. It is as good a time as any to think of Lee Kuan Yew, whose funeral Modi will attend next Sunday, and of Singapore and India and their fates and futures. Lee was a strongman in every sense…
First election since 1984 where a national party is looking like sure-fire winner Last weekend, just before the first phase of voting in India’s 16th general election opened, a group of people gathered in Delhi for a “nation-building” meeting. For two days they thrashed and turned in their search for a better alternative to the…
More than once in the past couple of weeks, before he climbed into his plane to fly off to more island nations, Narendra Modi was at his histrionic, chest-thumping best in Parliament. His voice rose and fell as he spoke, now in a shouted challenge and then dropping to a whisper. MPs, and a larger…
The prime minister’s speech at the World Economic Forum was sweeping and aspirational (one observer said he was “preaching to the choir”). He presented India as the most attractive investment destination in the world, with its democracy, its young population, its diversity and the headroom it has in catching up with the West’s levels of…
It says a lot about Narendra Modi’s absence of apprehension over Friday’s no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha that the same day the foreign ministry announced his visit to Rwanda, Uganda and South Africa. He will be away during the first full week of the monsoon session, which could be the last of the 16th…
I like only one kind of fudge and one kind of shake, the chocolate kind. And I especially dislike fudges and shakes of the economic kind. The Narendra Modi government, by no means on its last legs, has treated us to quite a bit of the second type over the past two years. It’s not…
Several moons ago, a car driver in Chennai told me the fascinating story of a young man whom he drove around in Coimbatore during the 2009 general elections. At every stop, the driver said, the young man would return with a bulging sack that he would stuff into the boot. The young man was collecting…
Certainly not the growing number of people who believe that “free speech” means a loose mouth and the abuse of certain classes or communities. Imran Masood, Azam Khan and Mulayam Singh Yadav are not afraid of Narendra Modi. Nor is the swelling saffron sena if you believe Ram Rajya is about to dawn. In its…
The end of campaigning in Amethi in a cacophony of anger, derogation, and obloquy was briefly leavened by “Twitter joining Rajinikanth.” The Superstar’s followers piled up at the rate of 20,000 an hour. Not even Narendra Modi, one of the Thalaivar’s first followers, could have matched that. Fantasy had trumped politics. As if in affirmation,…
One word summed up the five-week election: certitude. From the very beginning, most of us were certain that the National Democratic Alliance would win power. It is fairly certain that the Congress party will suffer its worst defeat in 16 general elections. Over 300,000 kilometres, 440 rallies, 1,350 holograms, 4,000 chai pe charchas, and a…
The Rajyabhishek in the magnificent Rashtrapati Bhavan forecourt was a sight for sore eyes, and understandably some of us went ape even if we were not among the 4,000 people attending Narendra Modi’s oathtaking. It was still a modest event compared with the 1.8 million people who attended Barack Obama’s January 2009 inauguration. Talking about…
To begin with, Modi is under microscopic watch and Deng never was. Modi has a good majority in the lower house of Parliament, but that does not mean lawmakers will blindly rubber-stamp his legislative efforts. If you do the arithmetic the National Democratic Alliance stands little chance of a majority in the Rajya Sabha, even…
We are hopefully in the last of this summer’s dog days, and Sirius (or Svana as it is known in Hindu astrology) will glow a little less brilliantly in the hot night sky. Dog days are said to induce all sorts of mental upheaval, agitation, and unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why much of Europe wisely…
Coasting down the six-lane highway from Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar, wheels barely touching the asphalt, it is tempting to forget that you are in the India of traffic chaos, noise and tumult. Gujarat’s administrative capital reminded me more of Putrajaya, Malaysia’s high-tech capital complex outside Kuala Lumpur, than of the headquarters of Modi Unlimited. The Gujarat…
Gujarat’s Chief Minister tells Chaitanya Kalbag in a wide-ranging interview that policy and process make a heady development cocktail Narendra Modi is not a tall man, but he exudes self-assurance and authority. There is something of the High Priest of Mohenjo-Daro about him, presiding at the altar of Capitalist Gujarat under the gaze of an…
As we prepare to vote, lots of loose talk lies ahead If you believe in the theory of evolution, as I do, then you will agree that one of the very few things that separates us from our earliest ancestors is the faculty of speech. Scientists speculate that we were communicating through speech as far…
Will we get a Lokpal? Will we not? The answer is blowin’ in the wind It’s a nail-biter. I predicted in another column that the Lok pal Search Committee of eight eminent persons might cap a five-year slow waltz just before the general election. On January 17, the Supreme Court instructed the committee to come up…
It’s good we now have a GST, but its design is another matter Since you all love acronyms for the Good and Simple Tax and the Grand Stupid Thought, the headline is my humble contribution to your lexicon. I dare you to find me a single expert who can measure the financial cost of the…
Governments cynically scoop out value from their own companies. Privatisation will work only when the government sells more than 50 per cent of a state-owned company’s capital to the public and relinquishes management control. This has not happened. Successive governments have mostly destroyed value by divesting only thin slivers of public sector undertakings (PSUs) and…
The government must take courage and embrace privatisation Two numbers speak eloquently about our schizophrenia over privatisation: the Rs 2.11 trillion ($32.5 billion) package announced on October 24 to recapitalise public-sector banks (PSBs); and Rs 2.67 trillion ($41 billion), the total earned by the government in 26 years from the divestment of its stakes, in…
Team leader Modi is fishing in a shallow talent pool How much of a hurry is prime minister Narendera Modi in? It depends on your horizon. By one measure, he has 22 months, but then he has set an October 2, 2019 deadline for Swachh Bharat, and August 15, 2022 for a New India. Mohan…
Strong, sustained growth is possible—if we don’t trip ourselves up We can hope that in the run-up to the next general election we will not suffer the type of jolts to our nervous systems that hit us in November 2016 and July 2017 with demonetisation and the introduction of the GST. “Those two shocks seem…
The only antidotes to fake news are truth and commonsense Start exercise your smartphone thumb, because the next big election will be fought on our mobiles. The latest Internet and Mobile Association of India survey says 86.5 per cent of users access the Internet via mobiles and smartphones. That works out to over 430 million…
Many anniversaries this year, but few happy ones This is a year of anniversaries , some unpleasant, some prescient, some momentous. CE 2019 is important not only because of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s crushing victory in the world’s biggest election – in many ways a more portentous event than Narendra Modi’s 2014 ascent to prime…
Merchandise, tourism, a board game, a biopic, a web series … If you want to decompress from the 2019 election campaign, and haven’t already donned the colours to be a cheering face in a shouting crowd at one of the prime minister’s rallies, then go to his website, which has a link to ‘NaMo Merchandise’.…
Get set: Campaign 2019 will rivet, horrify and confound you For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is in relation to Narendra Modi. At one place it says: If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common…