A regime of revival?

Only four of the 14 Prime Ministers of India have had the distinction of completing more than a decade in office. These include Jawaharlal Nehru, who helmed the country for 17 years; Indira Gandhi, who became Prime Minister twice, from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 to 1984; and Manmohan Singh who was in office (but not in real control) for ten years (2004-2014), because effective power lay with Sonia Gandhi, the chair of the UPA. From 2014, the premiership has been held by Narendra Modi, whose decade has been described as one of Indian Renaissance. It is but natural that contemporary observers of political economy will want to draw comparisons among these helmsmen – not just in terms of their abilities in handling the economy, food security, internal affairs and foreign policy, but also in terms of the template they inherited, and the legacy they left behind.

In this context, Aishwarya Pandit’s edited volume ‘Indian Renaissance: The Modi Decade’ brings together 28 eminent authors — Tony Abbot, Aman Bhogal, Ashish Chauhan, Namit Choksi, Robert Clark, Scot Faulkner, Antonia Filmer, Johnathan Fleming, Bharat Kaushal, Avatnas Kumar, Rajiv Kumar, Ann Liebert, Satoru Nagai, Madhav Das Nalapat, Grant Newsham, Vinit Prakash, Cleo Paskal, S Prassanarajan, Don Ritter, Samir Saran, Priya Sahgal, Kartikeya Sharma, Penny Street, Raymond E Vickery, Pankaj Vohra and Taguchi Yoji, besides the editor herself. In 26 articles, they present their perspectives on how Prime Minister Modi has set about the task of redefining the governance paradigm — from our relationships with the UK, US, Japan, China, Africa and the Arab world to our role in mediation and consensus building for the new world order, along with the strides made by the nation in the realms of defence, education, health, technology, capital markets, digital economy and financial markets.

The idea of Bharat

The context is set by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s Foreword. She calls the period as ‘a transformative narrative in which the citizens of the nation surged ahead, not in isolation, but as a vibrant part of a global family’. She argues that this period has to be seen, not just in terms of an unprecedented economic growth, but also for its deft handling of cultural and civilisational issues which had been left unattended for centuries. This is what Madhav Das Nalapat calls ‘replacing the idea of India with the idea of Bharat’. Pre-millennial readers may recall that at the turn of the century, Sunil Khilnani had argued that the idea of India was actually a modernist construct foisted upon this sub-continent by the vision of Nehru who created institutions which defined the post-1947 India. To Nalapat, India was the name given to the sub-continent by those who conquered it, and therefore there could be no groundswell for it. He says that Bharat is the name with which her citizens identified themselves and ideas of Bharat must draw from its civilisational past. India, to him, is a metaphor for the ‘subjugated past’. In fact, he avers that the very first article of our Constitution should have started with Bharat that is India, instead of India that is Bharat.

Tony Abbot, Satoru Nagao, Robert Clark, Scot Faulkner, Don Ritter and Raymond Vickery, in their respective articles, talk about how India is redefining her relationship with the world by her willingness to engage with one and all, and offer a new democratic alliance in the India Pacific region in association with the US, Australia and Japan. Likewise, the relationship with the Arab world is on an even and firm keel and insulated from our engagement with Israel.

The great disruptors: Kennedy and Modi

Legacy is a central theme in the articles of Pandit and Saran. Pandit is keen that India dismantle the political and cultural legacy of the ‘colonial Raj’. According to her, it ‘received the first real knock when Prime Minister Modi won the mandate in 2014’. Quoting The Guardian article of May 8, 2014, she argues that this ‘marked the end of a long era in which the structures of power were not very different from the ones that Britain used to rule over the sub-continent’. Pandit compares Modi’s term in India with that of Kennedy — the great disruptor in US politics. The first Catholic to become the President in the predominantly White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) polity, he unabashedly wore his belief system on his sleeve, and changed the way in which the Americans connected with their President. She also brings in the pithy comment of PR expert Dilip Cherian who wrote ‘Modi stood out (also) because he was preceded by Prime Ministers like Narasimha Rao who was tactfully silent, IK Gujral, who was lacklustre, Vajpayee who was romanticised as a poet, and Manmohan Singh who was designed to be marginal. By abolishing article 370 and triple talaq, along with the passage of the CAA and the support to the UCC in the state of Uttarakhand, Modi has demolished the shibboleths of the Congress consensus which were the leitmotif of governance for the first six decades of our Independence.

Saran says that Modi’s greatest contribution in foreign policy and world affairs is his challenge to Manicheanism’s binary or dichotomous worldview. He says that positing elitist cosmopolitanism against parochial nationalism is unfounded — for the notion of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family), which was also the theme of India’s G20 presidency, is based on the fundamental premise that a nation’s ability to serve the planet and wider humankind is bolstered when it helps its own citizens first, and that ‘within the service of the local lies a solution for the world.’

Ram is not fire, Ram is energy

S Prasannarajan waxes eloquent about the ability of Modi to connect with his stakeholders, and the ability to make an appeal that is both universal and conciliatory. Thus, in his address at Ayodhya after the consecration of the Ram Mandir, he spoke with poetic flourish: ‘Ram is Flow, Ram is Effect, Ram is not Fire, Ram is Energy, Ram is not a dispute, Ram is a solution, Ram is not just ours, it belongs to everyone’.

In The Catalyst, Kartikeya Sharma, one of India’s younger Members of Parliament, talks about how the past decade has seen not just legislative enactments — such as the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, the 2023 Women’s Reservation Bill, which aims to reserve a certain percentage of parliamentary seats for women — but also grassroots initiatives and substantially higher funding for programmes focused on women’s health, education, skilling, and financial inclusion. Pankaj Vohra points out that while many columns have been written on Modi and governance, it is also important to note that in a democratic polity, the government can only be as strong without the backing of a political party. Modi’s role in taking BJP from strength to strength is brought out in this chapter.

The last entry is from an expat entrepreneur Taguchi Yoji, who heads the Mitsubishi Corporation in India. He notes the change in mindset, systems and institutional responses from his first assignment in India from 2007 to 2012, and his current assignment which started in 2019. He points to physical, financial, digital infrastructure as well as the India-US initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies as pointers to a new India — which is not a follower, but a leader — and he gives the credit for this transformation to none other than Prime Minister Modi, who has set even more ambitious targets for India 2047!

I would certainly recommend this book for all those who would like to gain a ringside view of the transformation that is currently underway in the country. Whether or not it is a renaissance can only be adjudicated by the next generation, but one can certainly say that it is not ‘business as usual’.

The writer, a former Director of LBS National Academy of Administration, is currently a historian, policy analyst and columnist, and serves as the Festival Director of Valley of Words — a festival of arts and literature