The Latest: Top stories of the day
1. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government celebrates its second anniversary today, with Modi speaking at a rally in Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur.
2. The Cabinet on Wednesday approved a National Capital Goods policy with the intention of creating 21 million new jobs by 2025.
3. A Bajrang Dal leader in Ayodhya has been arrested after a video emerged showed the group training with weapons.
The Big Story: Third-year itch
Exactly two years to this day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was sworn in having just led the Bharatiya Janata Party to the first single-party Parliamentary majority since 1984. The scale of the victory and the promises that led to it, that the Good Times would be coming, meant expectations for the government were sky high. The fact that they were following a United Progressive Alliance government that had spent its last two years bumbling around after the revelation of major corruption scandals only increased the anticipation for a party that would usher in real development, as it repeatedly promised.
In his first year in charge, Modi tried. His government, given the incredibly rare gift of low oil prices, attempt to expand on schemes set in place by previous administrations and announced a slew of long-term schemes from the Jan Dhan Yojana to Smart Cities and low-cost housing. But it also overplayed its political capital using the Ordinance route to change the Land Acquisition law, before beating a slow, gradual, politically damaging retreat. If this was ostensibly done to win state elections, it failed to do that too: The big prize of Bihar went to an anti-Modi grand alliance.
While the BJP has since consolidated on its prime position, becoming a truly national party that influences politics across the country, the Modi-led government has been less successful. Its flagship reforms, from the Goods and Services Tax to the Land Acquisition law to labour, remain in limbo because of the Opposition's refusal to play ball (and some woeful floor management by the BJP's Parliamentary leadership).
Some legislative work is now going through, with efforts like the Bankruptcy law and the introduction of a Monetary Policy Committee likely to bring more clarity and stability to the economy. But even these have been tainted by the government's insistence on using a questionable route, money bills, to pass legislation with far-reaching consequences. Meanwhile, many still question the government's Gross Domestic Product numbers, no major Public Sector Units have been privatised, subsidies have not been attacked in any significant manner
The government has notched up some major successes, and there is no question that it has done a better job at implementing projects than its predecessor (even the ones initiated by previous governments). But where India was expecting visionary leadership from Modi and a grand approach to policymaking, it has got an unending set of dangerous cultural politicking ‒ from love jihad to ghar wapsi to beef to Bharat Mata ki Jai ‒ that say nothing at all about development.
Two years of the Narendra Modi government has confirmed that India elected an implementer-in-chief in 2014, whose only visionary tendencies tend to be dipped in saffron.
The Big Scroll
Two years in, for 'Make In India' to work, India first needs to become globally competitive. And for 800 million citizens, Modi's Digital India highway is a bridge to nowhere.
Politicking & Policying
1. The Congress' woeful results in the recently concluded Assembly elections may prompt the government to move the Goods and Services Tax Bill on the first day of the Monsoon session of Parliament, according to a piece in the Times of India.
2. Leaders of the Left were annoyed at the full-page ads carrying new Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's face, with the Communist Party of India, an alliance partner of Vijayan's CPI(Marxist), warning against a "personality cult".
3. African Heads of Missions asked the Indian government to defer Africa Day celebrations and demanded that African students in the country are kept safe, forcing the Ministry of External Affairs into damage control.
4. Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah added some nuance to his Congress-mukt Bharat promise, saying it would be a dismantling of the Congress system.
Punditry
1. Modi's trip to Iran offers an opportunity for India to rebuild its relationship with Tehran, but New Delhi has its work cut out writes Srinath Raghavan in the Hindu.
2. The BJP failed to understand the cultural ethos of West Bengal, relying on imports from North India who further the party's Hindi-speaking image in the state, writes Swapan Dasgupta in the Telegraph.
3. Govindraj Ethiraj in the Business Standard writes that citizens and lawmakers need to think of building better cities, rather than just improving the air.
Don't Miss
Taran N Khan writes about the unspoken code of conduct for landlords in Mumbai, which keeps Muslim tenants out.
"To rent a house in this way is to always exist on the edges, in more ways than one. It is to live in an apartment with a view (if there is a window) of something incomplete and under construction, to traverse metal sheets and gravel on your way home. It is to live with a brittle sense of temporariness – across agreements and contracts, across rent agreed upon every 11 months. It is to recognise the fraught nature of your own desirability as a tenant.
This reality may rise or fall depending on your income levels and markers like faith, marital status and caste. There are shades to this experience, just as there are different experiences in this massive city. But fundamentally, being a tenant from any of the less than optimum categories often means agreeing to be a wraith, to being less than a complete person."
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