When Narendra Modi was sworn in as India's prime minister on May 26, it was indeed a remarkable if not historic moment. He was taking office as the first prime minister in three decades to win a majority on his own in Parliament. And he was coming off an energetic campaign which had successfully enthused Indians from many walks of life. What's more, much of this credit went directly to Modi himself, responsible for creating a "wave" which almost single-handedly catapulted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to victory.
Never one to miss an opportunity, Modi invested the moment with heavy dollops of pomp and pageantry. A few days before the swearing-in, Modi made sure to bow down in respect on the steps of Parliament. To the ceremony itself were invited the heads of all the SAARC nations, a masterstroke that immediately made it an international event. All of this meant that when Modi started work on May 27, his government had immense momentum behind it. And of course, behind the soft power of public goodwill was the hard power of a majority government headed by a strong leader.
In the 100 days since the swearing in, this momentum has been used fairly well to fix the nuts and bolts of the Union government, bettering on what the UPA left behind. The recently launched Jan Dhan Yojana being a prime example of this approach which puts in place a concrete strategy behind achieving financial inclusion, improving on the UPA's haphazard approach to the same issue. In the same vein, the Modi government announced its intention of amending the MNREGA to create more durable assets. Environmental rules, often used by the UPA as a proxy License-Quota-Permit Raj, have been relaxed, helping reassure Big Business. FDI in defence, rail and insurance has been announced. The Planning Commission, which had lost much of its teeth anyway, was abolished and rightly so: it was an anachronism in a federal polity. Foreign policy also saw a boost, with Modi putting new life into India's neighbourhood policy with his trips to Nepal and Bhutan (even though cancelling talks with Pakistan might be a strategic misstep).
Overall, in what was a refreshing change from the complete paralysis of the last two years of the UPA, the BJP government is actually doing something. Ministries are coordinating together and bureaucrats are functioning as they should, rather than expending all their energies in turf wars: a clear outcome of having a prime minister with actual political power.
Administrative efficiency is necessary condition in government and Modi seems to have bought that in. That said, administrative efficiency is hardly a sufficient condition on which to judge the new dispensation: Modi is running the federal government for 1.3 billion people, not a municipal corporation or a medium-sized private company. As the government for a sixth of humanity, Modi needs to present policy, an overall strategic vision with which to guide the country. Here it seems, he has, till now, fallen well short.
In most areas of economic policy, the BJP seems to be quite content with following the UPA's vision. The budget was famously described by one commentator as a "Chidambaram budget with saffron lipstick". The Aadhaar scheme was sought to be bought on track, the BJP's earlier opposition to it quietly shelved. Retrospective taxation was continued with as was the entire subsidy scheme of the Congress. The BJP is supposed to be more federally inclined that the Congress; this was certainly true when it didn't have a majority in Parliament and needed allies. However, this view has changed now and the Modi government seems fine with a Congress-esque paternalistic centre-state model: the budget does not bother to change how the Centre transfers money to the states and all Centre-sponsored schemes were renewed as is.
There is a startling similarity in the way both governments approached their education policy as well: neither seems to have any policy at all. The new HRD minister is quite content to fight petty turf wars with some IIM or IIT, clean ignoring the massive education crisis that India faces now, both in school as well as higher education. Same goes for GM crops: both governments have put in their lot with the luddites, refusing to budge on even the basics like testing.
In the few areas that the BJP has diverged with the Congress on economic policy, it has actually regressed, retreating into a self-defeating protectionist shell. The BJP has reaffirmed its commitment to disallow FDI in multi-brand retail, its trader vote bank overruling any larger responsibility to the economy. And in the WTO, Modi stalled a crucial deal aimed at improving trade facilitation between countries. Ironically, given all the newsprint that was dedicated to bashing the Congress on its Food Security Bill, the BJP held up the WTO deal citing the food security of the poor as an issue. In fact, it even sought to paint the Congress as anti-food security given that the Manmohan Singh government was ready to sign the deal. It might be noted that the only states that agreed with the BJP's decision here were Bolivia, Cuba and Venezuela, countries not known to be strong evangelists of the Free Market.
It is, however, in law and order and social policy that the BJP seems to have delivered its biggest disappointment, and indeed given rise to much alarm. Given the BJP's (as well as Modi's) recent history, there was a good chance that the new government might disturb the peace (whatever little India had). Sure enough, post May the BJP has adopted a muscular communal policy, especially in UP, a state where it saw spectacular gains in the Lok Sabha elections and now views as low-hanging fruit, ripe for the picking. It raised the manufactured bogey of 'Love Jihad', a fanciful but potentially powerful tale of sexual hysteria. The party's UP president even publicly declared that Muslims committed "99%" of rapes in the state and "Yogi" Adityanath blithely declared that he was not shy of committing mass murder. For his efforts, Adityanath was promptly put in charge of the upcoming UP by-polls, a déjà vu moment if one would care to remember Modi's Gaurav Yatra just after the 2002 riots. Far from putting in any new paradigm for Indian secularism, the BJP was simply going down its old road of 1991 and 2002—only this time with greater vigour: public mass murder threats by major leaders are a new low even by this standard of politics.
Overall, it seems that the BJP has, in its first 100 days, bought little new thought to the table. It is content with carrying on the UPA's economic polices, but unlike the UPA's moribund state, this government actually works, so that's a positive. Of course, as of now that positive bit is significantly outweighed by the negativity of the party's social policy, where it has no qualms sparking-off a low-intensity civil war in the country's biggest state in order to capture political power.