Gandhinagar: About a year ago Narendra Modi sat down with some of India’s best and brightest to mount a “shock and awe” election campaign.
From an unmarked office in Gandhinagar, the young men and women worked on turning a fragmented parliamentary election involving 543 seats into a presidential-style referendum on candidate Modi.
In doing so, Modi cut loose from the traditional structure of BJP and adopted the language of a youth, using everything from holograms to WhatsApp.
The modern approach worked; the BJP and its allies led the count in 329 parliamentary seats, far ahead of the 272 majority required to rule.
In recent years, the state Modi has governed since 2001 has been compared with Guangdong prov-ince, the spearhead of China’s economic revival. But repeating Gujarat’s success nationally presents significant challenges in a country with a complex federal structure, a bureaucracy more wedded to socialist controls than reform and a growing gap between rich and poor among its 1.2 billion people.
India must create 10 million jobs a year, four times the pace of the last 5 years, to absorb youth into the workforce. And unlike China, India is not centralised.
Modi will have a fight on his hands to gain full cooperation from many state governments, which he needs to implement his agenda nationwide.
Meanwhile, some have said the pace of development in Gujarat has caused crony capitalism under Modi's unquestioned rule.
