28 12 febraury 2018

wo days before he relinquished his post in November

1905, Lord Curzon—arguably the most cerebral, accomplished

but also inflexible Viceroys of India—delivered a remarkably

candid speech at the byculla Club in bombay. He dwelt on the

infuriating challenges of governing a country as vast and com-

plex as India. The Viceroy, observed Curzon, “must be prepared to

speak about everything, and often about nothing. He is expected

to preserve temples, to keep the currency steady, to satisfy third-

class passengers, to patronise race meetings, to make bombay and

Calcutta each think that it is the capital city of India, and to purify

the police... If he does not reform everything that is wrong, he is

told that he is doing too little; if he reforms anything at all, that

he is doing too much.”

The context may be different and the political systems vastly

dissimilar, but there are moments when the Prime Minister of

India, elected on the back of a popular mandate, must empathise

with Lord Curzon’s exasperation with popular expectations of rul-

ers. This is particularly true of Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister

heading the country’s first single-party majority Government

after rajiv Gandhi. whereas the bar on expectations from a fragile

coalition government, buffeted by conflicting pressures, is often

set low, a majority government is popularly believed to have a

magic wand. In the case of Modi, the expectations are dizzying.

Having been elected on the strength of being a performer and the

promise of ushering in ‘achche din’ (good times)—the clever coin-

age of a copywriter—Modi is often perceived as the man who must

have all the answers and all the solutions. even the remotest sign

of tentativeness has the potential of transforming hero worship

into disappointment, frustration and even anger.

The Modi Government got a foretaste of the volatility of the

electorate on the morning of finance Minister arun Jaitley’s

fifth budget when the ruling bharatiya Janata Party was roundly

defeated in three by-elections in rajasthan—a state where the

saffron party had won all Lok sabha seats in 2014 and registered

a conclusive victory in the assembly election a year earlier.

arguably, by-poll results in one corner of India shouldn’t be

over-interpreted, particularly when the past 12 months have wit-

nessed the bJP winning spectacularly in the all-important state

of Uttar Pradesh, handsomely in Himachal Pradesh, polling 49

per cent of the popular vote in Gujarat (although suffering sub-

regional setbacks), cobbling together a government in Manipur

and Goa, and re-establishing its ties with Nitish Kumar in bihar.

yet, the rajasthan defeats did add to the anxieties of a government

that has been affected—not so much by a buoyant opposition

or the never-ending carping of media critics—but the growing

talk of widespread rural distress. The by-election results seemed

a small confirmation of this phenomenon.

Not that either the Prime Minister or finance Minister needed

such electoral setbacks to be forced into knee-jerk reactions. If

there is one facet of Prime Minister Modi that fellow politicians

(including those in the bJP) have found unsettling, it is his unwav-

ering approach. It may sound excessively adulatory, but Modi’s

attitude to politics is determined by a fixity of purpose. He is in-

clined to chart a course and unwilling to let politics derail him. on

the contrary, he is convinced that popular backing will inevitably

follow if the road taken is right. Unlike Margaret Thatcher who

too had these attributes, Modi, however, is not ideological in the

political sense. He has a commitment to India’s greatness which

is unswerving, and is willing to run an obstacle race to ensure it

happens. He is not afraid of minefields along the way.

yet, this determination is coupled by a flexibility of approach, a

hallmark of Gujarat’s famed adaptability. by instinct, Modi is not a

statist and is inclined towards community self-help. However, un-

like Thatcher whose life’s mission was to roll back the frontiers of

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budget 2018

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