This week I was planning to write about Narendra Modi’s image both here and in foreign lands. Readers of this column regularly berate me for writing more often about the Dynasty than the Prime Minister. They charge me with ‘hatred’ of the Gandhi family and troll me viciously. I was planning to bow to the demands of the box office and comment on Modi’s stature at home and abroad. Especially abroad where on the world stage the most powerful leaders today are a collection of clowns, tyrants and brutal warmongers.
This subject will have to be postponed for another time because Rahul Gandhi, always irresistible, said something that was so weird and mysterious that I found it hard to ignore. Days after he challenged the Prime Minister to say ‘Donald Trump, you are a liar’ inside the Lok Sabha, he suddenly found himself on Trump’s side. The President of America, as has now been widely reported, said that the Indian economy was dead. A comment that in the eyes of most political analysts was both offensive and foolish but not in the opinion of the Leader of the Opposition.
When reporters accosted him outside Parliament House and asked what he thought about Trump’s remark, he said, “But the Indian economy is dead. Trump is right. Everybody knows that the Indian economy is a dead economy…except the Prime Minister and the finance minister.” He added that the BJP had destroyed the Indian economy to help Gautam Adani. Now I am no economist, but you do not need to be one to know that this remark is both bizarre and bewildering.
Memory and the license raj years
But, very much in keeping with the economic ideas Rahul Gandhi expressed during the election campaign in 2019 when it was Anil Ambani he was obsessed with. Remember those days when he and his sister campaigned with toy fighter jets in their hands to make the point that Modi made money out of buying Rafale jets. Mr. Ambani, in his view, was the launderer of this bribe. This was never established. Never proved. So Ambani was forgotten.
To come back, though, to the ‘dead Indian economy’, may I say that Rahul Gandhi appears not to have any memories of those years when Granny was prime minister and the Indian economy was dead, dead, dead. Ask anyone who lived through those times, and they will tell you what shopping for groceries used to be like. There were shortages of the kind that countries experience only when there has been a war or a massive natural disaster. We queued and queued and queued. Daily necessities like bread, milk and sugar were always in short supply. And, when it came to ‘luxuries’ like cars, you could remain in the queue for ten years.
The richest Indians did not dare invest for the fear that if they exceeded their quotas to produce cars, scooters and air-conditioners, they could be fined and sometimes jailed. The only businessmen who thrived in those times were smugglers. They smuggled in gold and household goods like toasters, irons, kettles, coffee makers and mixers and sold them for a huge profit. As for us ladies, we would sneak off to smugglers in Karol Bagh to buy cosmetics, perfumes and fancy underwear.
Things began to change only when the license raj ended. And one of the beneficiaries of this was Narendra Modi. I have never forgotten that first campaign of his when he talked of how government had no business to be in business. One of the reasons why people like me supported him was because of the hope that he would dismantle what remains of the licence raj and curb the evil officials who end one regulation only to make two more. They lived better in those central planning days than big businessmen and they had more power. They could destroy major industrialists with just a single signature. And they knew that they would get away with this because the political leaders who were their bosses were all lefties of the most committed kind.
Both leaders need a rethink on economy
If the Leader of the Opposition wants to understand the real meaning of a ‘dead economy’, he needs to go back to his economics tutor and ask him to loan him some books on Nehruvian socialism. A short course is all he needs, not a degree, but a short course is essential because he leads our oldest political party and the only one that can challenge the BJP. Meanwhile, he would do well to keep his economic ideas to himself because they are ideas that are truly dead.
My grievance against Modi is that he has failed to dismantle the remnants of the licence raj. He allows his bureaucrats too free a hand to make rules and regulations that crush real enterprise. Government-sponsored startups and unicorns are just a new incarnation of the public sector. What we need is a new generation of economic reforms that would truly make it easier to do business and India will take off beyond anyone’s imagination.
Trump’s tariffs could turn into a real opportunity for India instead of being the threat that they currently appear to be. But for this to happen, Modi needs to remember that he once believed that the government had no business to be in business. Meanwhile, Rahulji can go back to his economics tutor and ask him to explain clearly why the Indian economy is not dead.