Opinion Tavleen Singh writes: ‘Time for PM Modi to show he can turn his slogans into visible reality’

Perhaps India will be alright despite these things. But just to make sure of this, we need to up our game. The reason why China is more alright than us is because it is in competition with the United States to become the world’s most powerful economy. It is now so advanced when it comes to new technological frontiers that it has come up with an AI model that is as good as any and much cheaper. It has been the factory of the world for decades and though our prime minister told us again last week that this is a role we will play soon, we are not there yet.

We are not there for many reasons. But one big reason is that instead of concentrating on the things that matter, most BJP leaders spend their time on things that confirm that we still have third world priorities. Instead of making a serious effort to improve the abysmal quality of our public education system, they choose to stir up a needless war over Hindi. The list of things to do before we can begin to compete with China, or even East Asia, is long but our political leaders concentrate on what they understand best, which is how to create tensions between Hindus and Muslims.

Last week, there was a huge row in Maharashtra over someone having praised Aurangzeb and in Madhya Pradesh, the police thrashed men they suspected of being cattle smugglers. In Delhi, the process of erasing Moghul names from roads and their ‘glories’ from our history books continues briskly, causing Indian Muslims to feel as if the objective of these exercises is to make them feel like second-class citizens. Can we not get beyond all this?

The extraordinary response to the Mahakumbh (more than half the population of India is believed to have turned up) is proof, not that proof was needed, that Indians are certainly the most religious people in the world. But now that it is over, the Prime Minister may need to get his team to work on things that could help India reach closer to the economic heights that China has reached. Any traveler to China will tell you that its cities look like real cities and its infrastructure is dazzling. I last went more than ten years ago and took a train from Tianjin to Beijing that traveled at more than 300 kilometres an hour. There was a time long, long ago when China was still in the clutches of Maoism that India was ahead in almost every way. So, what went wrong?

Every time I have put this question to an Indian bureaucrat, the answer has always been that it is because we are a democratic country that we have been left behind. This is rubbish. Democracy is the one achievement that puts us ahead of China in a very important way. With the right leadership and real resolve, we will surely build the factories and infrastructure we badly need to compete with China. It will take much longer for China to build those institutions of democracy.

Small comfort, though, since in the world that is now being remade by Trump, India will need to do a lot more to catch up if we want to be not just competitive but relevant. No number of prayers are going to help us get there. What we need are leaders with a modern vision of the road that we need to travel for us to remain relevant in the changing certainties of the new world. Narendra Modi could soon be facing the biggest test of his political career. It is no longer enough to give us nice slogans and words of comfort. It is time for him to show that he can turn slogans like ‘Viksit Bharat’ and ‘India’s century’ into solid, visible reality.