India’s choices in 2019: Modi has reforms to his credit, UPA free rode on Vajpayee’s reforms
At independence, India suffered from widespread poverty, abysmal social indicators and rudimentary infrastructure. It then went on to adopt socialism as the centrepiece of its development strategy, with attendant features such as licence permit raj, distribution and price controls, and autarkic trade policy. The result was meagre progress for almost four decades.
The process of change began gathering steam only with liberalising reforms, first introduced grudgingly in the second half of the 1980s and then deliberately from 1991 onward. But with the first four decades nearly lost, despite progress in recent decades, India’s problems have remained massive. Therefore, as a critic, if you choose to evaluate any of India’s governments according to problems that remain unsolved, you can have a field day. That is precisely the approach critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi have taken.
Such criticisms prove nothing and indeed apply with greater potency to preceding governments. Genuine evaluation requires assessing the progress made by a government against that by other governments. If this correct metric is applied, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the present government has done splendidly well and that a return to any available alternative, which will inevitably be some variation of the erstwhile United Progressive Alliance (UPA), would set back India’s economic progress.