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| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: Sep 03, 2014, 05:10 AM IST
Prime Minister Narendra Modi should not complain as he did a month after coming into office that he did not enjoy the mandatory honeymoon period with media. He meant that the media had not been kind to him. He would perhaps change his view after seeing the special pages devoted to the Narendra Modi government’s first 100 days in office. There has not been much carping either about the government. It was indeed a feel-good coverage of the milestone. The economy is looking up. There is a turnaround in market sentiment. Global investors find India interesting and attractive once again. The Prime Minister is energetic. He means business. He is driving his ministers and the bureaucrats to work harder than ever. None of this is far off the mark. The positives indeed outweigh the negatives by a huge margin. The government, the PM, his ministers and the officials are justified in celebrating the 100 days.
There is indeed the Modi, and the BJP, stamp in all of this. The man and the party have never fought shy of marketing themselves. Modesty and restraint are not part of their vocabulary. It is not a bad attitude either. Ask a marketing/sales team as to what is the important thing to keep going and to achieve targets, and the answer would be that motivation is very important, and that the small achievements should afford as much satisfaction as the big ones. The idea is to keep the spirits high.
It is the team leader who matters most in these matters. Modi leads from the front. He started off on a grand note when he got the leaders of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) to attend the swearing-in ceremony of his government on May 26. He made people, including his critics, sit up and take note when he spoke at the end of the Motion of Thanks to the Address of the President in Lok Sabha on July 8. The other big, noteworthy speech of the Prime Minister was from the ramparts of the Red Fort on the Independence Day. After 10 years of a self-effacing Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister, a loquacious Modi is indeed a refreshing change. The flip side is this: For everyone in the government and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in media and in the public arena, Modi is the dominant figure to the exclusion of everything else. It would be too early to describe it as Modi cult. There are however clear signs of an emerging cult. If all success is imputed to Modi, then when things are not as good as they should be, or when things go wrong, then Modi will be man who will face the flak as well. Modi understands well the rules of the game. He is game for bouquets and brickbats.
It is not the fault of the government that there are no solid achievements in the 100 days. There could not have been any. Some programmes like the Jan Dhan Yojana have been launched, and the banks are in a frenzy opening millions of new accounts of the poor. Modi has used the powerful phrase to describe this: getting rid of financial untouchability.
The admirable idea has got off to a good start. But it is just the beginning of the process and there is a long way to go before a real difference is made in the lives of the poor.
That is indeed the lesson of this first hundred days.
