Head-on | Why 2024 could be an inflection year for India and Modi

2023 was an exceptional year for India: A successful G20 presidency; Chandrayan-3’s moon landing near the lunar south pole, a global first; and an economy growing at 7 per cent in a world hit by recession and torn by wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the year though began with a loss in the Karnataka assembly election but ended with sweeping wins in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan.

Not surprisingly, the Opposition looks at the 2024 Lok Sabha election with foreboding. It knows that another five years in political oblivion could spell the end of several family dynasties that run most political parties in India, including the Congress.

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Opposition leaders — ranging from Rahul Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee to Nitish Kumar and Arvind Kejriwal — put aside their political differences to patch together a united 28-party bloc called Indian National Democratic Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.).

Can the idea of I.N.D.I.A. strike an electoral chord in 2024? Seat sharing is the key. But in important states like West Bengal and Maharashtra, dissent among I.N.D.I.A. partners is already brewing.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, for example, has offered Congress just two seats out of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats. In Maharashtra, Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena, without consulting its allies, the Congress and the Sharad Pawar-led NCP, has announced that it will contest 23 of the state’s 48 Lok Sabha seats. That assertion is likely to be strongly contested by Sharad Pawar and the Gandhis.

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Banerjee and Kejriwal floated the idea of Mallikarjun Kharge, Congress’ 81-year-old president, a Dalit from Karnataka, as the prime ministerial face of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc. The Opposition wants to send a signal to scheduled caste voters and those in the south that their interest will be taken care of.

The inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya on January 22 meanwhile will set the tone for the 2024 Lok Sabha election. By boycotting the inauguration, the Opposition could be walking into a self-made trap.

The narrative

Despite the Modi government’s majority in Parliament, the political and social narrative is still often set by the Opposition. The Left-Congress-Islamist ecosystem has powerful friends in the media and among retirees in the chattering classes.

The fallacious trope that Indian democracy is in danger has long been buried by robust state and parliamentary elections over the years, several won by the Opposition. The old ecosystem, however, exhumes the trope periodically with agenda-driven journalism. Take a recent example of three articles appearing on the same editorial page in a leading daily on Sunday, December 24, 2023.

Exhibit one: An article titled What is it like to be a Muslim in India? The columnist bases his piece on a new book by Ziya Us Salam called Being Muslim in Hindu India: A Critical View. He writes: “Muslims are 15 per cent of the population but only 4.9 per cent of state and central government employees, 4.6 per cent of the paramilitary forces, 3.2 per cent of IAS, IFS and IPS and, perhaps, as low as 1 per cent of the Army.”

The columnist doesn’t add that Muslims account for nearly 30 per cent of jail inmates but form less than 1 per cent of start-up founders. The reason? After 70 years of being treated as a vote bank, India’s 220 million Muslims are more impoverished and backward than SC/STs.

The article ends with a comment that is communal and can inflame religious sentiments: “(The book) What is it like to be a Muslim in India? could threaten the integrity and future of our country.”

This is appalling journalism and does not belong in a respectable newspaper.

Exhibit two: On the same editorial page, a former governor bemoans why Indians of different faiths seek jobs abroad without stating the obvious reason: after 190 years of ruinous British colonial rule that impoverished India (while enriching Britain), Indians still struggle to find jobs and are often forced to seek employment overseas. The writer, like the ecosystem he inhabits, misses the point entirely.

Exhibit three: On the same editorial page again, a former BBC India correspondent calls the three new crime bills legislated last week “a reversion to the colonial police that (author) Kripal Dhillion wrote about.”

Several clauses in the new crime legislation remove draconian elements in the 150-year-old criminal codes written for a colonised country by its coloniser. But several clauses in the new legislation give the police more powers than warranted. They need to be amended.

Police reforms are obviously overdue. The Supreme Court’s seven-point directive issued in September 2006 in the Prakash Singh case hasn’t been complied with. A properly nuanced article would have pointed this out while seeking compliance with the SC order by states since law and order is a state subject.

The purpose of citing these three articles on a single editorial page in a single leading newspaper is that India has been subjected to a misleading narrative for far too long.

On the flip side, it’s true that a large section of the media unabashedly toes the government line. The task is to balance tough but constructive criticism of the Modi government with clear-eyed acknowledgment of its achievements over the past near-decade in power.

The achievements

What are those achievements and how will they transform India in 2024?

First, infrastructure. The advances made in building infrastructure have been transformative: airports, sea terminals, highways, bridges, power plants, metros, housing.

Second, digitalisation. India’s public digital stack led by the UPI and ONDC, has made India the world’s most cashless payment society after China. Astonished foreign CEOs visiting India say it has left the West far behind.

Third, healthcare. Apart from successfully fighting the Covid pandemic, gifting vaccines to developing countries and producing its own homemade vaccine, India’s Ayushman Bharat health insurance scheme has helped millions of poor patients receive free medical treatment up to Rs. 5 lakh per family.

Fourth, technology. By placing every infrastructure project on the Gati Shakti Masterplan web portal, firms can pinpoint exactly what parcels of land are available for new projects while the government monitors in realtime the progress of each of several thousand public and private infrastructure projects.

Fifth, taxation. Reducing the corporate tax rate to 22 per cent has moved India closer to the low-tax regimes of Singapore and several countries in Europe. Tax revenue (corporate, personal, customs and excise) in 2023-24 is likely to exceed Rs. 30 lakh crore, 15 per cent above Union Budget estimates. With GST collections trending at an annualised Rs. 20 lakh crore (of which the centre’s share is Rs. 11 lakh crore), India’s fiscal position is gradually recovering to pre-Covid levels.

Sixth, economy. At a GDP growth rate of 7 per cent in 2023-24, India is the world’s fastest growing major economy. At this pace, India will be the world’s third largest economy well before 2029. Merchandise and services exports are likely to cross $1 trillion by 2026-27, making India the world’s fourth largest exporter after China, the US and Germany.

Rising from penury

At Independence in 1947, colonised India’s GDP was a puny Rs. 2.70 lakh crore. In 2023 it is Rs. 325 lakh crore – a growth of 125x in 76 years.

By purchasing power parity (PPP), the fairest comparison of living standards according to the IMF, India’s per capita income in 2023 is $9,133. That is still a fraction of US per capita income (PPP) in 2023 ($66,062) but the gap is narrowing.

India still has appalling poverty and sanitation. Both metrics are improving. But much more needs to be done. As 2024 beckons, the real work lies ahead.

The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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