Modi must show he means business

Politicians make promises, businessmen insist on delivery — even when they are fulsome in their praise. Prime Minister Modi will learn this soon enough. His meetings in New York with the giants of investment and manufacturing, and later in the San Francisco Bay Area with the top guns of Silicon Valley and iconic IT chiefs, couldn’t have gone better. They loved what he had to say. Rupert Murdoch, the media moghul eyeing the opportunity to play a big part on the Indian scene and hoping for relaxation of restrictions, extolled

Mr Modi as India’s best Prime Minister ever.

What’s going for the Indian leader is that US business is still keeping faith with him. They must be persuaded that he is strongly pro-market and strongly pro-liberalisation and are willing to cut him some slack — i.e. give him time to tidy up on the political dimension in which effort his government has met with singular failure so far.

The PM’s Make in India and Digital India programmes are unlikely to go far without the backing of foreign capital and technology, and the economic and commercial discussions are a key focus area during Mr Modi’s six-day US venture this year. Aware of this, he batted with caressing strokes. In a townhall-style meeting at the Facebook headquarters, he gave expression to his core conviction with candour. “Government should have no business to be in business,” he observed.

This is the same as the old US saying that “the business of America is business”. But the PM sincerely means it. In the run-up to the Lok Sabha election last year, he had said more than once that his maxim was “maximum governance, minimum government”. This means pretty much the same thing. The trouble is that politics comes in the way in a relatively poor country, which India continues to be, in spite of having one of the fastest rates of growth.

So far the Modi government has failed to dazzle on the economic reforms front — deregulation, cutting of red tape, introducing transparency and accountability in business, having a stable tax regime — though there is no dearth of promises. In fact, on Mr Modi’s watch, India has slipped down in the rankings in ease of doing business. If world business is ready to give the Modi regime a little more time, perhaps it will expect that it will show its political opponents greater accommodation so that road blocks may be eased in Parliament to allow passage of laws that international business seeks. Fine words alone are seldom enough.