Apropos ‘Real winner is democracy’, by Atul Kohli (IE, June 12). Though his write-up is ad hominem against Narendra Modi, I agree with him when he says that “the real winner of the 2024 elections is India’s democracy”. But that is only half the truth. He should have also added that the losers are the ones who repeatedly claimed that democracy was on its last legs in India since all its institutions like the Election Commission were under Modi’s control.
What’s the big deal about “abki baar, 400 paar”? PM Modi gave himself and his supporters a target to achieve. Is it not something all electoral players do? Didn’t the INDI Alliance say it would secure 295 seats after the polls, and Rahul Gandhi claimed multiple times that Modi wouldn’t be prime minister from June 4 onwards? Can Modi’s performance in his 10 years in office be termed as “mediocre”? Only those wearing ideological blinkers can make such an outlandish statement, for this is wholly divorced from facts.
By 2013, Morgan Stanley had classified India among the “Fragile Five” economies in the world. This is when Modi took over in 2014 and set the Indian economy on a trajectory of fast growth and inclusive development. Today, India is the fastest-growing among the world’s major economies.
According to the World Economic Situation and Prospects report released last month, India’s economy is forecast to expand by 6.9 per cent in 2024. Consumer price inflation in India, it claims, is projected to decelerate from 5.6 in 2023 to 4.5 per cent in 2024. Meanwhile, the United Nations has revised India’s growth projections for 2024 to 7 per cent this year. India’s expected resilient growth rate has to be seen against the backdrop of the current global economic scene, which continues to be bleak because of several factors, including Israel’s onslaught on Hamas and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The world economy is now forecast to grow by 2.7 per cent in 2024.
In the last decade, infrastructure has had a phenomenal thrust. Some of the numbers are startling. The National Highway (NH) network increased by 60 percent – from 91,287 km(2014) to 1,46,145 km (2023). Length of four lanes and above NH increased by 2.5 times – 18,387 km (2014) to 46,179 km (2023). In 2014-15, the pace of National Highway construction was about 12 km per day, which increased to about 28.3 km per day in 2023-24.
A significant change has also taken place in the area of financial inclusion. The mutual fund folios increased from 3.9 crore to 16.5 crore between 2014 and 2024. Under Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, 52.43 crore beneficiaries have banked ₹228,747.22 crore balance in beneficiary accounts, so far. Modi’s welfare plans made available 10.32 crore free gas connections and 4.2 crore pucca houses to the underprivileged and facilitated compensation for 6.27 crore hospital admissions. Around 25 crore people moved out of multidimensional poverty in the last nine years, according to a report by NITI Aayog.
What the World Inequality Lab report has said about rising income disparity in India, a few weeks before Lok Sabha elections, Oxfam, a tainted British charity outfit, had said earlier. What is the source of the World Inequality Lab report? One of them is Hurun Report Inc. The company was established in 1999 by Rupert Hoogewerf, also known by his Chinese name Hu Run. With 150 employees on its payroll, Hurun is headquartered in Shanghai. The company was launched in India in 2012.
The report’s political bias becomes apparent when it says that inequality has been particularly pronounced since the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party first came to power in 2014. It claims that over the last decade, major political and economic reforms have led to “an authoritarian government with centralization of decision-making power, coupled with a growing nexus between big business and government”. Imagine a company with links to China terming a democratically-elected Indian government as “authoritarian”.
Before this report, there were several other studies whose findings were ludicrous. According to the World Happiness Report 2024, India ranked 126th out of 143 countries, trailing behind nations such as Libya, Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan and Niger! In the Global Hunger Index 2023 rankings, India was placed 111th out of 125 countries, behind Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
Rahul Gandhi’s rich-poor binary is a farce. Ambani-Adani were not born in the Modi era. The exponential growth in their business empires took place under Indira Gandhi and subsequent regimes.
How correct is the claim that Rahul Gandhi emerged from these elections as a credible leader? Rahul’s Don Quixotic solutions to end inequality, Robin Hood formulas to redistribute wealth and emphasis on caste identities make a fatal cocktail. It’s a dangerous and divisive agenda.
Is he a democrat? Just recall what he did at a press conference on September 27, 2013. He tore apart a copy of the ordinance that the Manmohan Singh government had passed after consulting Sonia Gandhi. He remote-controlled UPA governments for a decade, without any accountability.
During the last 10 years, India has come a long way. It has emerged amongst the five nations with the highest GDPs and is within touching distance of being number three in the world. The timeless nation is poised to leap forward to develop fully by 2047. As the French author Victor Hugo, “No force on earth can stop an idea, whose time has come.” India is such an idea.
The writer is the author of recently published, ‘Tryst with Ayodhya – Decolonisation of India’
