Economy and a divided society will be Modi’s biggest challenges
But he must overcome ‘slowdown’ in order to ‘take country to new heights’
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi described his first term as “filling in potholes” — shorthand for addressing the country’s basic needs.
In a campaign speech in April, he pledged that his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party would “try to address people’s aspirations and take the country to new heights” in the next five years.
Modi claimed a decisive victory in India’s elections, the vote count showing his BJP winning a commanding majority in the lower house of Parliament allowing it to form a form a government on its own.
The victory signals that millions of Indians believe that Modi’s leadership is what the country needs to become a modern, developed and prosperous nation, while raising questions over how he and his party use such hefty political capital to advance their Hindufirst ideology and development agenda.
Modi’s vision of India is threefold, political analysts say: getting India into the exclusive $5 trillion (Dh18.36 trillion) economy club that includes the European Union, United States, China and Japan” asserting itself as a nuclear power and a force in the world” and placing its Hindu heritage at the Centre of politics.
By 2030, the BJP has pledged to expand the Indian economy from the world’s sixth-largest, a rank the World Bank said it achieved in 2017, to the thirdlargest.
Modi believes he can do this by building on some pre-existing social programmes, including rural electrification, microloans and digitisation.
Other ideas, such as doubling the incomes of India’s legions of distressed farmers and building millions of homes to replace
mud huts, are promises from his 2014 campaign that are still unfulfilled.
Santosh Ahlawat, a former BJP member of Parliament from the desert state of Rajasthan, said the new administration will be a “people’s government which will go full throttle on all fronts” to build on the achievements of Modi’s first term.
But before Modi can work on ramping up the economy, he will need to address its apparent slowdown, economists said.
Amitabh Kant, chief executive of government-supported think tank Niti Aayog, said the focus of the new government will be to push annual economic growth from 6.6 to 9 per cent.
“We have to carry through more structural reforms and accelerate growth and for that, we have to open up more sectors of the economy. We will continue with our earlier policies of extending electricity, housing and other benefits to reach Indians in rural areas and we will enhance the flows of private investment coming in. The big challenge is to accelerate our growth rate,” he said.
At the heart of the election campaign was an existential conflict between the opposition Congress Party’s idea of a pluralistic, diverse multicultural republic and the BJP’s ideology of Hindu nationalism, in which the country’s fundamental character would not be as a secular state but one with a distinct Hindu ethos where the majority culture dominates.
For political analyst Yogendra Yadav, Modi’s second term promises “a move towards a non-theocratic Hindu majoritarianism. Two is a move towards two kinds of citizenship in India with the minorities relegated to second-class status. In short, we will see a move towards Putin’s Russia.”
Vijay Chauthaiwale, a senior BJP official in charge of the party’s foreign affairs, rejected the accusation that Modi has created a culture of intolerance of minorities.
“Our development agenda is for all citizens. When we gave cooking gas cylinders to women, we didn’t ask what religion they were. When we gave electricity and health care cover to people, we didn’t ask what religion, gender or caste they were. So the BJP’s agenda is totally neutral on gender, caste and religion,” he said. Yadav said he based his sombre prediction on Modi’s first term.