4 wasted years of Modi: Good, Bad or Ugly  

No politician in recent years has taken the Indian political scene by such a storm as Narendra Modi did in 2014. The last Lok Sabha election was entirely a Modi show where Modi was the ringmaster and all his opponents seemed like junior players. Modi mesmerised the nation with his mass-hypnotising speeches and his ability to sell dreams that almost every segment of Indian society lapped up. The icing on the cake was sometime subtle and often not-so-subtle blend of communal politics of Hindu-Muslim divide. He promised the moon in 2014 and Indians swallowed it.

Four years later, Narendra Modi has turned out to be the greatest hoax of the 21st century. He literally has turned out to be a zero-delivery Prime Minister who conned India and left Indians in a lurch. Sensible Indians had sensed even in 2014 that doling out Rs 15 lakh to every bank account holder is not deliverable. But no one in his wildest dreams had imagined then that his cronies like Nirav Modi would rob Indian banks to the tune of thousands of crore and would one night flee the country quietly. Indian public sector banks’ total NPAs stood at Rs 7,33,974 crore up to September 30, 2017.

It is just the one facet of Modi’s economic mismanagement. The havoc that whimsical moves like demonetisation and ill-conceived implementation of the GST caused is well told and need not be repeated here. But it needs to be reminded here that the economic mismanagement of the Modi-Jaitely duo did lower our GDP growth with devastating effects on markets, businesses, trading, agriculture and jobs. Instead of creating new jobs, economic slowdown threw employed working men out of the job market. Farmers were forced to throw or burn their produce as traders had no cash to pay, India had not witnessed a gross economic disaster as it has under Narendra Modi’s four years of misrule.

Less said the better about Indian politics. India is now witness to a brand of politics that its founding fathers abhorred. It is the politics of lynching of its minorities, public flogging of its Dalit population and systematic erosion of its syncretic culture imbued with liberalism and modernity. Indian politics had never undergone the kind of intolerance that it has endured in the last four years. The hate politics of Hindutva peaked to levels India could have never imagined. Modi, through the four years, has been running a regime that is solely driven by the RSS agenda.

It would not be out of place to state that the driving engine of the Modi administration is the RSS machine and Modi is its driver. What all RSS hated from the time of Indian Independence, Modi saw to it that was at least partially rolled back. Institutions were packed with RSS puppets who made mockery of key constitutional bodies, ranging from Election Commission to higher judiciary, from Parliament to centres of learning like universities and institutes of research and academia.

Modi brazenly undermined the Constitution and the entire constitu-tional machinery in order to fulfil the RSS’ agenda. As a result, India is now facing a civilisational crisis of a magnitude that no one had imagined in the 70-plus years since Independence. We have come to a pass where India has started to resemble Pakistan. But India cannot be simply turned into a Hindu Pakistan as the Modi-led RSS-BJP machine might have imagined.

The sprit of a multi-cultural India has not just sensed the danger but has even begun asserting itself. Karnataka is a glimpse of that India where different castes and faiths come in an alliance to fight back an existential threat to its unity. The Karnataka experiment will surely bring about a new unity of all those political forces that will not just stop Narendra Modi but also foil the RSS bid to transform India into a

Hindu Pakistan. Four years of Modi Raj have proven to be the most disastrous years for modern India. We take an in-depth look at these four years through the pens of expert commentators and prominent public figures. It’s up to you to judge whether it has been good, bad or ugly?