Narendra Modi was sworn in as India’s prime minister in an elaborate ceremony at New Delhi’s presidential palace May 26, after a sweeping election victory that ended two terms of rule by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
Millions of Indians watched the inauguration live on television as the 63-year-old Hindu nationalist leader, once thought of as too divisive to lead the world’s largest democracy, took his oath along with his cabinet members in the palace forecourt.
Modi arrived on time – an unusual occurrence for an Indian politician – in a grey SUV, impeccably dressed in a beige waistcoat over a long white shirt. During the 90-minute-long ceremony, BJP workers at the party’s nearby national headquarters set off fireworks in celebration.
A ceremony involving military bands, Hindu holy men and a vegetarian high tea was laid on at the president’s mansion for Modi’s swearing-in as prime minister of the world’s largest democracy.
The low-caste son of a tea stall-owner, Modi won India’s first parliamentary majority after 25 years of coalition governments, giving him ample room to advance economic reforms that started over two decades ago but stalled in recent years.
Around 4,000 guests were invited, ranging from members of outgoing Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to top industrialists, Bollywood actors and the leaders of India’s neighbours – including arch-rival Pakistan.
The forecourt, covered in red carpets for the event, was heavily guarded with snipers on the rooftops of the mansion and some of the surrounding buildings. Military bands played bagpipes at the mansion’s entrance.
Modi said the election had delivered a mandate for “development, good governance and stability”.
“Together we will script a glorious future for India. Let us together dream of a strong, developed and inclusive India that actively engages with the global community to strengthen the cause of world peace and development,” he said in a statement.
FIREWORKS
Modi invited leaders from across South Asia to his swearing-in ceremony, including Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from rival power Pakistan, an unprecedented gesture.
Even before his inauguration, Modi had some recognition abroad, treated by many with suspicion – and by some as a pariah – for Hindu-Muslim violence that erupted 12 years ago in Gujarat, the state he ruled.
The U.S. administration denied Modi a visa in 2005, but President Barack Obama has now invited him to the White House.
He has spoken with the presidents of the United States and Russia and he has become one of only three people that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe follows on Twitter.
The pomp unfolded as the summer evening closed in at Rashtrapati Bhavan, a colonial-era sandstone mansion with 340 rooms in the heart of New Delhi.
Looking on were some 4,000 guests, ranging from members of the defeated Nehru-Gandhi family to top industrialists, Bollywood actors, Hindu holy men and the leaders of several neighbouring countries.
Supporters exploded fireworks in celebration a few blocks away at the headquarters of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after he was sworn in.
The day before he took oath, Modi kicked things off with an announcement that he would streamline the cabinet and move to a more centralized system of governing aimed at breaking decision-making bottlenecks widely blamed for dragging down economic growth.
Arun Jaitley, 61, will be the finance minister as well as running the defense ministry, party sources said. One of the top corporate lawyers in the country and a close Modi aide, Jaitley served in a previous BJP administration as commerce minister.
DIPLOMATIC GESTURE
Pakistan’s Sharif said after arriving in Delhi that South Asia’s bitterest rivals now had an opportunity to turn a page in their history of troubled relations.
He said the nuclear-armed neighbours, which were traumatically separated at the end of British rule in 1947 and have fought three wars since, should together rid their region of the instability that has plagued them for decades.
“We should remove fears, mistrust and misgivings about each other,” he told the Indian news network NDTV.
The BJP has long advocated a tough stance on Pakistan, with which India has a major territorial dispute in Kashmir, and Modi has been seen as a hardliner on issues of national security.
In that respect, Modi’s decision to invite Sharif for his inauguration and bilateral talks on Tuesday came as a surprise and raised hopes for a thaw in relations between the rivals, which have been particularly frosty since 2008 attacks on the city of Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants.
As a gesture of goodwill following invitations to the ceremony, Pakistan and Sri Lanka released dozens of Indian fishermen jailed for straying into their territorial waters.
India is the biggest South Asian nation, but friendships with neighbours have soured in recent years, allowing China to fill the gap.
China has built a port in Sri Lanka and is involved in upgrading another in Bangladesh, besides military and civil assistance to long-time ally Pakistan, heightening Delhi’s anxieties of being boxed in.
“Modi has appreciated the much-neglected fact that foreign policy begins at the nation’s borders,” wrote foreign policy analyst C. Raja Mohan in the Indian Express. “As a realist, however, Modi should be aware that major breakthroughs are unlikely amid the current flux within Pakistan.”
CHALLENGES AHEAD
About a year ago Narendra Modi sat down with some of India’s best and brightest to mount what one election strategist called a “shock and awe” campaign.
From an unmarked office in Gandhinagar, the capital of Modi’s home state of Gujarat, the young men and women, some on sabbaticals from firms like JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank, worked on turning a fragmented parliamentary election involving 543 seats into a presidential-style referendum on candidate Modi.
In doing so, Modi cut loose from the traditional Delhi-based structure of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its apparatchiks and adopted the language of a youthful country eager for change, using everything from holograms to WhatsApp.
The modern approach worked: just an hour into the counting, it was clear that the 63-year-old Modi was heading for a stunning victory with the strongest mandate any Indian government has enjoyed for 30 years.
“Development is the only agenda that can save the country,” Modi said in a victory speech in Gujarat last week during which he also called for an end to divisive politics.
“Development is the solution to all problems, development is the cure for all diseases,” he told thousands gathered there.
INDIA’S “GUANGDONG”
In recent years, the state Modi has governed since 2001 has been compared with Guangdong province, the spearhead of China’s economic revival.
Since Modi took control, Gujarat has led the nation in GDP growth. It accounts for 16 percent of industrial output and 22 percent of exports, despite having 5 percent of its population.
Under his stewardship, farmers and industry have been assured uninterrupted power, albeit at high rates, and bureaucratic controls slashed.
A central government-ordered study last month said it had the best land acquisition policies in place, among all of India’s 29 states in terms of ease of doing business.
Land, by far, has been the single biggest hurdle around the country, holding up 90 percent of infrastructure projects.
Gujarat’s highways are India’s fastest, a far cry from the potholed roads in the northern belt, and its ports are among the busiest.
But repeating that success nationally presents significant challenges in a country with a complex federal structure, a bureaucracy more wedded to socialist controls than reform and a growing gap between rich and poor among its 1.2 billion people.
India must create 10 million jobs a year, four times the pace of the last 5 years, to absorb youth into the workforce.
And unlike China, India is not centralised. Modi will have a fight on his hands to gain full cooperation from many state governments, which he needs to implement his agenda nationwide.
Some have said the pace of development in Gujarat has caused environmental damage and threatened small communities, and that crony capitalism flourished under Modi’s unquestioned rule.
Critics also say it lags behind other states in social indicators such as mortality rates.
But the criticisms have failed to stick.
“Modi has led from the front. None of this would have been possible, but for him,” said Rajnath Singh, the president of the BJP and a close associate who was also sworn in as a cabinet minister on Monday.
“PURVEYOR OF DREAMS”
Modi, with his neatly-trimmed white beard, was the only face of the campaign. He has covered 300,000 km since being named the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in September, addressing 457 meetings. When he could not show up, he appeared as a hologram.
“He has become a purveyor of dreams,” said Sanjay Gupta, a former state bureaucrat who quit to go into business and start a chain of hotels. “Its hard to see how he can meet all the pent-up aspirations without re-engineering the system.”
The son of a railway station tea-seller, Modi has humble roots which he reminds voters are in contrast to the privileged upbringing of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and its scion Rahul Gandhi, who led the campaign for the ruling Congress party.
Modi left home after school, virtually cutting off all family ties as he found his calling in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing organisation that serves as the ideological parent of Hindu groups and the BJP.
Its members, who hold military-style drills and indoctrination sessions at grounds across the country each morning, seek to make India a great power, militarily strong and economically prosperous.
Kishore Makwana, who used to ride pillion on Modi’s scooter during his days as a RSS propagandist, said Modi would sometimes sleep on the pavement because he had arrived too late at a host’s house and thought it impolite to knock at that hour.
“He hasn’t forgotten those days. He is firmly rooted,” Makwana said.
One thing Modi has never talked about publicly is his failed marriage, which reportedly took place when he was in his teens and after the couple had been spoken for by their parents in the tradition of that time.
Last month, he disclosed for the first time that he was married to Jashodaben in an election declaration after leaving the form vacant in two earlier elections he fought.
Modi, according to unofficial biographies, did not accept the marriage and may have left his home for that reason. Jashodaben went back to her brother’s house where she has lived and hasn’t met her husband for more than 40 years.
Modi, said to be a loner, has kept away from his immediate family too, meeting his mother and brothers only occasionally. In an interview he has said that his real education took place in the RSS and that he owed everything to the organisation.
To some, his background in the Hindu group and his handling of the riots in Gujarat remain a cause of concern. Critics say the RSS is deeply opposed to Muslims and that its objective of a Hindu India was a challenge to India’s secular traditions.
The organiZation says it only opposes appeasement of any community.
“I find the idea of Narendra Modi as the prime minister of this country deeply repugnant. It is an assault on the idea of India, because of what he represents and what his track record has been,” said former Congress federal minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, one of Modi’s most trenchant critics.
Within Gujarat itself, critics point to the segregation that has taken place over the last decade. For Muslims it is difficult to buy property in areas dominated by Hindus, forcing the community’s fast-growing urban middle class to live in cramped and decrepit corners of cities.
“Modi is set to govern all of India, the 150 million Muslims included, and there is reason to be cautious,” said Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley.
- Reuters