Depending on the person encountered, the responses to the Narendra Modi government after a little over six months in office can be aggregated into three broad categories.
First, there are those who remain as passionately committed to the Prime Minister as they were when he assumed office on May 26 this year. Yes, they admit that achche din haven’t arrived as yet, but they believe that the government is proceeding in broadly the right direction.
For them, the expectations of the Modi government doesn’t merely stop at low inflation or even better roads and assured power supply.
They expect that after a longish stint in office some say two terms and some are willing to bet on 15 years of a Modi dispensation the “new” India will be economically stronger and a true global power with a discernible measure of national self-confidence.
The second group isn’t so concerned with an inordinately long-term perspective. They may have supported Mr Modi during the general election or they may have voted for some other formation.
However, like a majority of Indians, they are willing to give the new government at least three years to prove itself before they start thinking in their mind as to how to vote in 2019.
As of today, they have noted the Prime Minister’s announcements and may even have been moved by some of his inspirational speeches. But since many of these proclamations of intent are yet to be translated into ground realities, they are anxiously awaiting implementation.
They want to see how the election of a Modi government affects their daily lives before they decide whether the leader is worth endorsing for the long-term.
Finally, there is a small but influential group of people who not only didn’t vote for Mr Modi in 2014 but actually voted against him.
Some of this group may well be die-hard supporters of either the Congress or the regional parties that were not part of the Bharatiya Janata Party alliance, but many are simply viscerally opposed to
Mr Modi. Part of the Opposition may stem from a belief that Mr Modi represents “communal” politics and challenges their “idea of India”. To such individuals, the intemperate utterances of a sadhvi minister or the simple formulations of Dinanath Batra are symptomatic of a pre-modern ideological baggage the government is said to carry.
This group can also be said to include individuals that are discomfited by the importance that is being attached to the private sector and the steps being taken to enhance the ease of doing business in India. In such a view, the victory of Mr Modi in 2014 was an aberration and it is only a matter of time before India slips back into “normal” politics.
A government that is elected to speak for all India, including those who voted against it in the general election, must necessarily incorporate all the three (or even more) perspectives in its political planning.
To a very large extent, the Prime Minister has done precisely that by, first, tempering the pace of change to take everyone along and, second, by incorporating facets of the earlier dispensation.
Predictably, this calibrated approach has not been to the liking of those of Mr Modi’s supporters who expected a near revolutionary break from the past.
It has also irritated the sceptics who feel that all governments must operate within the broad framework of the Congress framework.
Thus, while Mr Modi is expected to tone up the administration and maybe even undertake economic reforms, he cannot use his power to disband the Planning Commission or dilute the role of the state.
The real question that haunts every government is how much to press the accelerator and when to apply the brakes.
As things stand, Mr Modi has pressed the accelerator hard on issues concerning the economy. The reason is obvious: economic transformation takes a long time to be felt on the ground and as such an early start is necessary if the effects are to be felt in five years time.
The enactment of the Goods and Services Tax by the end of the Budget Session of 2015 is, for example, an absolute must for the simple reason that it brings order to a highly fractured domestic market.
Likewise, the government cannot afford to accommodate all political niceties in bringing legislation that amends the rough edges of the Land Acquisition Act.
Without these changes the “Make in India” initiative cannot succeed and if that boost to manufacturing and services is stymied the government will encounter an onslaught of disappointment from the very “young India” that voted it in so enthusiastically.
This prompts the question: how important is ideological engineering in the scheme of the government? My own impression is that the government is not too enamoured of the need to leave a decisive Hindutva stamp on its engagement with society.
However, there are groups that have devoted a lot of time and energy waging lonely battles to prevent Sanskrit from being overwhelmed by spurious modernism and rectify the obvious distortions of history.
They feel that an election of a BJP government at the Centre assures a place under the sun for them. They want to push their social agenda but without unsettling the government.
Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, these groups aren’t too accustomed to engaging with a sceptical world, having spent most of their activist years preaching to the like-minded.
This explains the ease with which they have fallen into some of the booby traps set up by a hostile media. Unwittingly some of these amateurish excesses have resulted in fierce controversies and may even have halted the pace of the government’s economic initiatives.
It will be worth monitoring what lessons the government as a whole has learnt from the controversy over the sadhvi minister’s utterances.
My own impression is that the government and the BJP may put in place a system of checks to ensure that both loose talk and social radicalism don’t divert focus from the main business of ushering economic change.
The writer is a senior journalist
