Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Red Fort during Independence day celebration in New Delhi on Thursday. (Express Photo by Praveen Khanna)
As someone born three years after India awoke to ‘life and freedom’ on that magical midnight, I had the misfortune to spend my growing years in those socialist decades when everything was shabby, second rate and in short supply. So for me, personally, the liberalisation that a Congress prime minister was forced to bring remains among the best things that have happened in our journey as a modern nation. The truth is that we got political freedom on August 15, 1947, but along with it came an economic dictatorship through central planning. It was the liberalisation brought by P V Narasimha Rao that gradually dismantled the licence raj. It is sad that this Congress prime minister has been so disrespected by his own party. He deserves our reverence and gratitude.
This was the first thought that crossed my mind while listening to the Prime Minister’s long speech from the Red Fort last week. But I paid attention to how Narendra Modi praised his own ‘reforms’ and wondered if he knew that there has been only a limited amount of real reform in the past decade. Roads, airports, trains stations and ports are being built faster, which is good. The welfare state is more efficient, which is also good. And history will record that one of Modi’s real achievements was the dramatic change in rural sanitation brought by the Swachh Bharat campaign that he announced in a more memorable speech from the Red Fort. I found it hard to agree with him when he asserted that he had transformed governance.
This is not true. The reason why none of the new denizens of that privileged enclave known as Lutyens’ Delhi has discovered this is because there is an iron dome above this piece of expensive real estate that prevents all real information from breaking through. Modi’s ministers are more inaccessible than Congress ministers ever were. This could be because he never had the courage to kick them out of their palatial bungalows and order them to live as more humble Indians do. This has led to serious failures in governance.
A recent, scary example is the way his Education Minister began by denying that there had been paper leaks in the NEET examinations or that the National Testing Agency (NTA) was seriously flawed. It was only because desperate students took to the streets and news channels took up their cause that this minister was forced to listen.
One of the most important reforms that should have been made in the past ten years is in the sphere of education. Millions of Indian children are forced to turn to government schools and colleges, because they are all they can afford, and they remain as lousy as they were before. Modi’s chief ministers have governed some of our most backward states in the past decade, and they did nothing to improve the rotten school system they inherited. The Prime Minister spoke of how he wanted to see a time when Indian students would not need to go abroad for higher education, but does he know that this remains a distant dream because of his government’s neglect of real reform. It is silly to boast of how many new colleges have been built if they continue to offer nothing that can be called an education. Quality is the problem. Not quantity.
My mind continued to wander during the speech, so I started calculating the things that India has achieved and the things that we have failed to achieve. Achievements make a shorter list. It is to the credit of Narasimha Rao and Narendra Modi that India at least looks better than it did in the years before the economy was liberalised. Private enterprise has bloomed and flourished and today we have world-class companies, hospitals, colleges, schools, hotels and restaurants. They would be much better if governance had improved enough to get officials out of the way. This has not happened so what has bloomed alongside is corruption as a mega industry.
If colonial governance had not continued to be practised by the men living under that iron dome much more could have been achieved. Instead of tinkering with this and that, the Law Minister should have discovered by now that the justice system does not work. It is too cumbersome, too expensive and too stuck in administrative methods that died in developed countries a century ago. The Minister for Urban Affairs would have noticed that our cities and towns look like vast slums with oases of cleanliness and prosperity dotted here and there. Has the Prime Minister noticed yet that there are no smart cities?
When Modi became prime minister a decade ago, he seemed to mean it when he promised economic liberalisation, but this has turned out to be a false promise. When was the last time you heard of a government company being privatised? When was the last time you heard an official mention the word? It must be sadly said that Modi has spent ten years walking along the same path that Congress prime ministers walked and it is a path that leads to that decrepit socialist India in which midnight’s children and some who came a few years later spent their childhood and youth. If Modi’s speech this year was uninspiring, it is because he has few new achievements to list. We must hope that real change happens now.
