Eighteen months ago, Narendra Modi won a major election victory in India and appeared to many abroad as an economic modernizer and developmentalist: someone who could raise sagging growth rates and restore India’s pride. Originally built up as a national savior by some of India’s biggest corporate leaders, he generated and still enjoys enthusiastic support among the international business community. Rupert Murdoch summed up the conventional wisdom with a recent tweet: “Best leader with best policies since independence.”
In recent weeks, a rising tide of Hindu supremacism has damaged India’s reputation globally, provoking anxiety and concern among a range of personalities and institutions from Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan to India’s respected central banker Raghuram Rajan and Moody’s Analytics. The humiliating defeat on Sunday of Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in Bihar, one of India’s largest and poorest states, is a much bigger setback.
Modi tried to polarize the electorate; he accused his opponents of promoting beef eating and terrorism, and of preferring Muslims to Hindus. But voters overwhelmingly spurned his party, giving a two-thirds majority in the state parliament to a coalition between the opposition Congress and local parties led by Nitish Kumar, a former Bihar chief minister. Full story...
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In recent weeks, a rising tide of Hindu supremacism has damaged India’s reputation globally, provoking anxiety and concern among a range of personalities and institutions from Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan to India’s respected central banker Raghuram Rajan and Moody’s Analytics. The humiliating defeat on Sunday of Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in Bihar, one of India’s largest and poorest states, is a much bigger setback.
Modi tried to polarize the electorate; he accused his opponents of promoting beef eating and terrorism, and of preferring Muslims to Hindus. But voters overwhelmingly spurned his party, giving a two-thirds majority in the state parliament to a coalition between the opposition Congress and local parties led by Nitish Kumar, a former Bihar chief minister. Full story...
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