Road to superpower status

Deng Xiaoping was once quoted as saying, "No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat, as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat."

It was a hard lesson Deng learned as secretary general of the Communist Party of China when Mao Zedong was chairman. He saw a country with tremendous potential but whose hope was virtually destroyed by the madness of one man in the name of the Cultural Revolution. One man, who promised that China would be the center of the world, became responsible for its destruction and fall.

It didn't take much time for Deng to understand the problem. Mao was an idealist but China needed a pragmatic leader.

The above quote is a testimony to Deng's pragmatism. After Mao's death, he disowned some of Mao's principles of socialism and embraced capitalism. Where Mao failed, Deng succeeded with his radical reforms and led the country toward unprecedented growth.

India today is in the same situation as China was after Mao's Cultural Revolution. Narendra Modi has proved to be India's Mao in terms of policy failures, despite being a popular and revered figure in his country, as Mao was in his.

But popularity is not a guarantee of policy success. On the contrary, it has been seen throughout history that most populist leaders proved to be the biggest disasters for their nation, Mao, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler being just a few examples. The back-to-back policy disasters in the form of demonetization, the GST, and the lack of substantive structural reforms has put a lot of pressure on the Indian economy.

But the Covid-19 pandemic has made matters even worse. India, which was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world for almost a decade, is now on the verge of depression. According to the International Labor Organization, more than 4 million young Indians have lost their jobs. Despite the Finance Ministry's economic bailout packages and the Reserve Bank of

India's sharp interest-rate cuts, the economy has hardly seen any activity during the pandemic.

Most economists agree that India may have long an elongated