Modi has misread electoral mandate

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…