Happy new year?

ON this first day of 2017 the only prediction that can be made with certainty is that today begins the most challenging year of Narendra Modi’s political career. If by this time next year he has been able to prove that he is capable of putting India on the path of change and development, then he will win again in 2019. If he fails to fulfill those promises he made in the summer of 2014, then his future looks bleak and India’s bleaker still. In the last weeks of last year we saw a great deal of our opposition leaders and it’s hard to look at these leaders and feel the smallest twinge of hope. Not one of them offers anything new, so when they came together to demand the Prime Minister’s resignation last week, it was like watching a very old movie yet again.

Modi is lucky to have such an uninspiring bunch of opponents but he must remember that any one of them will defeat him if this year does not bring signs of real reform. So far we have seen only promises of reform. Now that the Prime Minister has proved that he is able to take radical measures easily he must show that he can take radical measures in other spheres as well. Expectations have risen beyond all expectation since he abolished 86 per cent of our currency in one ruthless move. This measure continues to have popular support but only because people believe that it will truly stem the corruption that the average Indian citizen has to deal with daily.

This will not happen if the Prime Minister now fails to curb the powers of officials and especially those who work in ministries that deal with the economy. There is only one way to do this and it is by making good on his promise of ‘minimum government, maximum governance’. There has been no sign of this in his tenure so far and no sign that he knows that tax officials are hugely emboldened by the daily threats to catch and jail supposedly corrupt citizens. Is he aware that these officials are often more corrupt than the citizens they set out to catch? Is he aware that the vast majority of people working with ‘black’ money in the informal sector are honest, hardworking citizens who face daily harassment from officials?

Is he aware that the officials he has put in charge of implementing his favourite programmes have not delivered? Swachh Bharat remains mostly just a good idea as do schemes to improve living conditions in our cities and villages. So a child born in India in the first hours of this new year faces a dismal future. If he survives till his fifth birthday and manages to go to school, he will be lucky if at the end of his schooling he learns to do more than write his name and count well enough for his basic needs. He will not learn to use a computer, so when he starts looking for a job he will begin with a severe handicap.

It should shame every Indian political leader that the great Indian dream continues to be a government job. This sad reality was beginning to change after the economic reforms of the early Nineties, but because the 12 million jobs India needs to create every year remain uncreated, it is to government jobs that young Indians have once more started to turn. Now that millions of jobs in the informal sector have been temporarily destroyed by Modi’s most significant reform so far, there could be a period of even more hopeless job prospects.

My deadline precedes the Prime Minister’s new year’s eve address but I write in the hope that it will include measures that will lead to the creation of millions of jobs. Since the government proved long ago that it could not do this alone, Modi must announce ways in which it will become easier to do business in India. So far there has been almost no improvement since socialist times and it could be because all efforts in this direction have been blocked by officials. They know that their power wanes if India starts moving firmly in the direction of free markets and real democracy in economic matters. Things denied so far in the name of socialism. A very worrying consequence of the hunt for ‘black’ money is that we seem to have gone back to inspector raj days because of the power officials have been given to catch supposed crooks.

This column has said this before but it cannot be repeated enough: the only Indians with vast stashes of unearned, untaxed money are politicians and bureaucrats. Catch them Prime Minister because they are the real crooks. Most ordinary Indians are honest and very hardworking and have suffered much in 2016.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh