PM Narendra Modi PM Narendra Modi

It was good to hear the Prime Minister speak in the Lok Sabha last week. Not just because he made a good speech but because we need to hear him a lot more and his rabidly Hindutva ministers a lot less. Narendra Modi’s enigmatic silences when his associates have threatened to decimate Muslims (or send them to Pakistan) have made them more venomous. The latest to join the hatemongers club is the junior minister for Human Resource Development, Ram Shankar Katheria. He was present at a condolence meeting in Agra recently where Muslims were described as descendants of Ravana and warned of the need for a “final battle”.

As usual, the Prime Minister remained silent but the Home Minister defended Katheria, instead of admonishing him. If he did this in the hope that it will help the BJP win elections in Uttar Pradesh, he is wrong. Young Indians are more interested in jobs than in communal strife. And that Rama temple in Ayodhya has long been forgotten. So why is the Prime Minister allowing the diminishment of the mandate he was given for change? Why does he not notice that he could articulate better than anyone else the need for India to dump Nehruvian socialist economic policies that served mostly to keep the vast majority of Indians mired in poverty?

In the Lok Sabha, he taunted Congress leaders by saying that in 60 years of their rule, the roots of poverty had grown so strong that destroying them was no easy task. He needs to go further. It would be so simple to explain to the people of India that socialism failed because it made politicians and high officials into businessmen while demonising real businessmen. The demonisation of those who create wealth and jobs is a vital facet of Nehruvian socialism. This must change if we are to see signs of renewal in the ‘vikas’ department. The Prime Minister has taken to boasting these days about India being the fastest growing economy in the world, but he seems not to have noticed that the atmosphere in the country does not reflect this. Where are the new jobs Mr Modi? Why is Indian industry in the dumps? Why do officials continue to perpetrate an inspector raj? Why do Indian investors remain so reluctant to invest?

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There is no bigger political problem today than the economy because it leads to despondency in young people with aspirations for a better life. Now that the Home Minister was stupid enough to charge JNU students with sedition, there is every chance that unrest will spread across other campuses unless signs of an economic revival begin to happen soon. Those of us who remember those boom years after the licence raj ended know what a boom feels like. That atmosphere of economic renewal does not exist today and this has encouraged leftists to become more assertive than they have been for a very long time.

When Kanhaiya Kumar returned to JNU as a newly minted national hero, he made a speech that fascinated me because of the economic ideas he expressed. Listening to him took me back to the Seventies when Marxist thought was at its zenith. This was before Deng Xiaoping turned China into a capitalist country, before the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its economic failures, before that wall came down in Berlin and before Marxist countries in Eastern Europe discovered that the West had done better without communism.

While listening to Kanhaiya Kumar’s polemically excellent speech, it occurred to me that these momentous events must not ever have been discussed in the halls of JNU. Or why would our newest student leader still be talking of Stalin and Lenin as heroes and Hitler as history’s only villain? One of the main reasons why Modi became the first prime minister to win a full mandate in 30 years was because voters rejected the economic policies that have kept India poor. It was an unspoken rejection of Nehruvian socialism.

So the Prime Minister needs to be very worried that the economic ideas that kept India in poverty are being revived not just on university campuses (where this is normal) but by political leaders across the spectrum. You only need to YouTube recent debates in Parliament to hear their voices. Instead of joining this club by banging on about ‘the poor’, Modi needs to explain to ordinary Indians how India has been looted by politicians and bureaucrats in the name of socialism. He needs to go back to saying what he said often during his election campaign: it is not the business of government to be in business. When he became Prime Minister there was the hope that he would be able to give India a new economic philosophy by turning it in a rightwards direction. That hope is beginning to die.

@ tavleen_singh

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