ALTHOUGH MOST LEARNED commentators give the BJP-led NDA government of Narendra Modi pass marks for a good first year, it’s patently discernible that optimism is fading among leaders and pace setters in several sectors of industry, over the failure of the Modi government to boldly initiate the promises he made in his campaign narrative to rejuvenate the Indian economy. In office, the Modi government has proved surprisingly cautious, adopting a policy of incremental rather than the promised radical reforms.
Therefore, industrial and agricultural growth is sluggish and the number of rural suicides unabated. Moreover, despite international crude oil and petroleum prices having fallen substantially, inflation has not reduced commensurately. And perhaps most disappointingly, the promise of generating 10 million new jobs annually is nowhere near fulfilment.
The major infirmity of the BJP-led coalititon and the PM is loss of ideological compass. It was an open secret prior to General Election 2014 that the prime factor of Modi’s success as Gujarat’s three-term chief minister (2001-14) during which period the state recorded the highest annual rates of economic growth among all 29 states countrywide, was his belief in the power of private enterprise and commitment to free markets.
However, after his election as prime minister, instead of swiftly removing the bottlenecks and bureaucratic red tape which have plunged India to the near bottom of the World Bank’s transnational Ease of Doing Business Index, spooked by Congress and opposition parties’ old hat pro-rich rhetoric, the PM has distanced himself from Indian industry and business, vitiating the investment climate and consequently jobs generation.
Clearly, the BJP and Modi have failed to correctly interpret the resounding verdict of the electorate that people are fed up to the back teeth with the inorganic neta-babu socialism and public sector driven economic development model, which over the past 68 years has transformed high-potential India into a nation hosting the largest number of the wretched of the earth.
Right until the start of the 19th century, the Indian subcontinent generated 20 percent of the world’s GNP because of its 5,000-year-old private enterprise driven manufacturing, commerce and trade traditions. During those millennia, there was no licence-quota regime or state-owned public sector enterprises.
Correctly translated, the mandate of the electorate to the BJP/Modi government in General Election 2014 was to revive the entrepreneurial confidence of the Indian people, dismantle the bleeding public sector and develop the abundant human resources of the nation through investment in education, health and law, order and justice.
Unfortunately bogged down in Hindu revivalism fantasies, the BJP leadership lacks the analytical power to read the message of the people.
India must protest rohingya persecution
IT’S ALL VERY WELL FOR HIGH-FLYING prime minister Narendra Modi, who completed a year in office on May 26 as head of the BJP-led NDA government which swept the general election of last summer, to keep jetting off to new destinations abroad. During the past 12 months, the prime minister visited 19 countries reportedly to announce that India is open for business with foreign investors, and also to impact Modi-led India as an industrial and economic heavyweight. But projecting this image on the world stage also requires the prime minister to look beyond bilateral ties and speak up about major events confronting the global community of nations.
Right now a poignant humanitarian crisis originating in Myanmar/Burma, with whom India shares a 1,624 km border, is convulsing the — let’s face it, more compassionate — Western media and public. Tens of thousands of Rohingya (ethnically Bengali) Muslims, long-settled in the Rakhin region of western Burma, are being cruelly persecuted by the quasi-democratic military regime in Myanmar. To escape this unprovoked persecution, hundreds of them are taking tiny fishing boats out into the Indian Ocean in a desperate exodus to Malaysia, Indonesia and other South-east Asian countries. Surprisingly although Malaysia and Indonesia are Muslim majority countries, their governments have cruelly refused to grant them asylum which is mandatory for member nations of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
As a major Asian country, it’s necessary for India to condemn the cruelty and selfishness of these governments. First, the regime in Burma/Myanmar should be made to explain why the Bangladeshi and Rohingya minorities are being denied citizenship and human rights. Likewise, the Modi government which is intent upon projecting India as a major regional, if not global, power should launch a strong protest with Malaysia and Indonesia for their reluctance to adhere to the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Charter, 1948.
However, the strongest condemnation must be made of the inhosppitality of the government of Australia which has repeatedly turned away Afghan, Rohingya and other refugee boats from its shores. Not only is Australia a continent sized nation which can easily absorb the few thousand refugees washing up on its shores, it was a penal colony to which people exiled from Britain were cast ashore to fend for themselves.
In the circumstances, Australians need to be more hospitable towards refugees. Unfortunately, lingering traces of a ‘white Australia’ policy under which only Caucasian immigrants were invited to settle in the country whose original Aboriginals were massacred by the convict colonists, are discernible in the official and public reluctance to offer asylum to non-white refugees.
Prime minister Modi who visited Australia last November amid much bonhomie, needs to remind his Oz counterpart that in the context of 21st century geopolitics, Australia is an Asian country in which covert and overt racism could invite ostracism, trade sanctions and worse.