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Modi’s key challenges

What are the main challenges faced by Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister-designate?

One, he has to reassure Muslims, who constitute some 15 per cent of the Indian population. He has to address their feelings of insecurity and fear.

Though the Congress Party’s attempt to demonise him for his failure to prevent the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat riots, did not really succeed, a question mark still hangs over his secular credentials.

He reached out to Muslims in Gujarat with some degree of success (surveys show that around a third of Muslims supported him in that state); he has to do the same in other parts of India, while curbing and pulling up the hot-heads in his party who made irresponsible statements against Muslims, perhaps in the heat of the election battle.

Two, corporate India expects much, perhaps too much, from him. They expect him to remove at least some of the continuing bureaucratic hurdles that have prevented more foreign investment from coming into India. From being one of the most business-unfriendly countries in the world, New Delhi needs to become one of the more friendly ones. Conglomerates like the Tatas and the Birlas, who have, in sheer frustration, increasingly expanded their activities abroad, need to be lured back home. The stalled reform and disinvestment agenda at home, must also be renewed with increasing vigour.

At a more humbler level, the Indian public, hit by rising prices, particularly of food, looks eagerly forward to measures to lower the inflation rate.

They also want more jobs made available to them, not just in the cities, but in the rural areas as well, perhaps in the form of rural industries, as China has successfully done. That can only be done by increasing the economic growth rate of the country from 4.5 per cent a year, to what is was six years ago, 7 to 8 per cent.

Another reason many of them voted for Modi was that they were fed up of corruption, not just the massive scams related to coal allocations and the 2G spectrum, but in the citizen’s day-to-day activities.

“Corruption has become a way of life,” say many Indians with a sigh of resignation, as they are virtually forced to bribe policemen, sales, tax and customs officials. Modi, himself reputed to be completely honest — as indeed was the former prime minister, Manmohan Singh — needs to change that “way of life”.

Modi and his BJP party have got an unprecedented vote of confidence and also a vote for change.

He must now justify the confidence the public and corporate India have placed in him.