| Summary/Abstract |
During its first year in power (2014–15), the government of Narendra Modi in India showed itself to be a precarious enterprise. The prime minister was beset by multiple antagonisms. He radically centralised power. This has enabled him to get some things done swiftly, but it has weakened him by choking off reliable information flows from below and by sowing discontent among his party and his supporters. An exercise in fiscal decentralisation to the state level in this federal system ran counter to his centralisation, but on close examination, it proved less than generous. His efforts to tackle two problems—bureaucratic paralysis and high-level corruption—contradicted one another. His efforts to transcend the ambiguities which ensnare every prime minister were unrealistic and triggered further discontent among party colleagues. Finally, his handling of religious polarisation became entangled in multiple antagonisms—between the expectations of Hindu nationalists (and his own legacy as a polariser) and his duty to maintain social cohesion; between political gains to be made from polarisation and political costs that attend it; between polarisers who sought to strengthen his hand and those who sought to polarise in order to undermine him.
|