[India’s unemployment rate was 6.1 percent last year, the highest in 45 years, according to data the Modi administration suppressed until after the election. That went along with sluggish growth in gross domestic product, which slipped to a five-year low of 6.8 percent in 2018-19.]
By
Vindu Goel and Rod Nordland
 |
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Prime Minister Narendra
Modi, center, and to his right, President Ram Nath Kovind,
arriving at Parliament in
New Delhi on Thursday. Credit Adnan Abidi/Reuters
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NEW
DELHI — On Thursday, India’s
newly re-elected prime minister, Narendra Modi, unveiled his priorities for his
second term — and fixing the weakening economy was at the top of the list.
After a campaign that focused on Hindu
nationalism and national security, the Modi government adopted a more inclusive
tone, saying that it had been re-elected to continue the country’s economic
development and improve the lives of all 1.3 billion Indians.
“Empowering every person in the country is
the main goal of my government,” said Ram Nath Kovind, India’s largely
ceremonial president, in a speech to parliament. The president is charged with
conveying the administration’s agenda at the beginning of each new Parliament
session.
To the nation’s hard-hit farmers, the
government promised about $359 billion in aid — a sum roughly equivalent to the
country’s annual budget — over an unspecified period. Small traders and
shopkeepers, it said, will get new government pensions, and small businesses of
all sorts will get government loans to help them grow.
For poor women, a crucial constituency that
voted heavily for Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, the government pledged to
give them priority access to 20 million new homes that it plans to build over
the next three years.
“The voters have given him another chance,
but this time he will have to get down to addressing these basic economic
issues,” said Arati Jerath, a columnist and political analyst in New Delhi.
“The big gorilla in the room is employment, creating jobs. It’s been incredible
just the past few weeks, downsizing across the board.”
Yet Mr. Modi’s economic agenda was notable
for what it left out. The government offered more seats in schools to young
people, but offered no substantive plan for finding employment for the hundreds
of thousands of them who enter the job market every month.
India’s unemployment rate was 6.1 percent
last year, the highest in 45 years, according to data the Modi administration
suppressed until after the election. That went along with sluggish growth in
gross domestic product, which slipped to a five-year low of 6.8 percent in
2018-19.
Mr. Kovind repeated Mr. Modi’s goal of nearly
doubling the size of India’s economy to $5 trillion by 2024 — a wildly
unrealistic target that would require India to increase its annual growth rate
to an average of 14 percent over the next five years.
But reforms sought by the business sector,
including an overhaul of government-owned banks and changes to the law to make
it easier for factories to acquire large tracts of land, went unaddressed.
Mr. Modi swept into power in 2014 at least in
part on promises to create millions of new jobs and to make India an economic
powerhouse to rival China. But with unemployment already at historic highs well
into his first term, this year’s election campaign focused on national
security, with B.J.P. members casting themselves as “watchmen” against
terrorists and neighboring nations like Pakistan.
The B.J.P. also vowed in its second term to
pass a Hindu nationalist agenda, including abandoning India’s official
secularism and making Hinduism, the religion practiced by about 80 percent of
the population, the guiding ideology of the government.
On Thursday, the Modi government made clear
that it intended to follow through on one important part of that promise:
expelling illegal immigrants who are Muslim, mainly from Bangladesh, and
granting Indian citizenship to illegal immigrants who are of other faiths.
“Illegal infiltrators pose a major threat to
our internal security,” Mr. Kovind said.
To weed them out, the government said it will
set up a process for creating a National Register of Citizens in border states
such as West Bengal, requiring all residents to prove their right to be in
India. A similar process already underway in Assam State has been
controversial, with longtime residents being placed in detention camps.
The Modi government will also reintroduce
so-called triple talaq legislation, which would outlaw traditional Muslim
divorces — in which a husband can divorce his wife by repeating the word talaq,
or divorce, three times.
Such divorces were already declared illegal
by the Supreme Court in 2017, and some critics view the follow-up legislation
as an unnecessary attack on Muslim families; others see it as an attempt to
curry favor with Muslim women.
During the campaign, Mr. Modi struck a
populist tone, emphasizing achievements such as the building of tens of
millions of toilets for people who previously had to visit fields to relieve
themselves — never mind that many of the new facilities went unused. Similarly,
he announced a vast new public health care program for the poor, nicknamed
Modicare, but has yet to adequately fund it.
Ms. Jerath, the analyst, said that the B.J.P.
had avoided economic issues during the election because its record had been so
poor.
“These were not issues they wanted to bring
up,” she said. “Nationalism and security were easy to use to divert attention
from bread-and-butter issues. The great failure of the opposition was they
completely failed to make these issues the center of their campaign. But now
the government cannot avoid them.”
The striking thing about the election
results, according to Gilles Verniers, an assistant professor of political
science at Ashoka University, near New Delhi, is that the B.J.P. did particularly
well in areas that were pummeled by the economic crisis.
“We’re in a bit of a curious situation here,
a month after a verdict largely analyzed as being disconnected from economic
issues, which does not make sense,” Mr. Verniers said. “Still, the B.J.P. knows
that if it doesn’t address the long-term economic issues, it’s going to hit a
wall.”
Follow Vindu Goel and Rod Nordland on
Twitter: @vindugoel and @RodNordland
Suhasini Raj contributed reporting.
