Will Narendra Modi be Disastrous for India?

What disaster is Manmohan Singh predicting about Narendra Modi? The common people of India have been facing an equal severity of disaster under all of these politicians and there is no ray of hope in any foreseeable future.

By Rakesh Raman

On Friday, Jan. 3, the Prime Minister (PM) of India, Manmohan Singh, announced his retirement that will happen after the Lok Sabha elections scheduled for May 2014.

While suggesting that Rahul Gandhi, the scion of Gandhi family that Manmohan Singh served, will be the right candidate to take the baton from him, Manmohan Singh didn’t mince his words to say that Narendra Modi, the PM candidate from opposition party BJP, will be disastrous for India.

Manmohan Singh is right, in a way. It’s not only about Narendra Modi, but all politicians – including Manmohan Singh – have been disastrous for India ever since India got freedom from the British rule in 1947.

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Modi is just a new player in the dirty political game that has ruined India in the past over six decades after the country’s independence.

Most who are not familiar with India’s political system believe that India is some kind of a democratic country poised to be a superpower in the global arena.

But that’s far from truth. India is not a democracy; rather it’s a plutocracy where some 1000-odd politicians are being managed by almost an equal number of rich businessmen to destroy the country and its people. Thus, a handful of these selfish crooks are deciding the fate of over one billion people.

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Result: In India’s population of over 1.2 billion, more than 80% are so poor that they live on less than $2.50 a day, according to data from the World Bank. Worse, most of these people don’t have even a place to live. They live and sleep on footpaths and many die in extreme winters or extreme summers.

Then what disaster is Manmohan Singh predicting about Modi? The common people of India have been facing an equal severity of disaster under all of these politicians and there is no ray of hope in any foreseeable future.

An average Indian has always been buried under poverty, unemployment, corruption, inflation, suppression, and misgovernance under all types of rulers from all political parties.

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Manmohan Singh may have announced his retirement now, but for most in India, he was always a tired and retired soul even when he was the PM.

Even an enemy nation can’t do the extent of damage that Manmohan Singh has done to India during his tenure as the PM. While he has been the main catalyst to promote corruption in the country, he failed on almost every front.

Some people kept thinking he is an economist while others thought he is a clever politician. Manmohan Singh survived and thrived on this confusion and finally pushed the country in a miserable state.

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Today, it’s not only the rampant corruption and absence of governance in India, but even the economy is in a disastrous state. On a per-capita-income basis, India stood at a poor 141st rank in the world of about 200 countries by nominal GDP and at 130th by GDP (purchasing power parity) in 2012, according to the latest data from IMF.

And 2013 has been the worst for the Indian economy when investments almost dried up partly because of Manmohan Singh government’s inability to handle the economic crisis and partly because of the hostile bureaucracy in the country.

In August 2013, the Indian rupee hit an all time low of 68.80 against the US dollar and it has failed to come back at a respectable level. And prices of each item required to run a normal household are rising in a way as if there is no ceiling. India’s human development index is at a dismal rank of 136 in the world.

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And all this disaster happened under Manmohan Singh’s regime. Is there a scope for Modi to do anything worse than this? Now Modi or no Modi, Indians have nothing to lose because they are already living in a kind of hell called India.

Today, if there’s some kind of hype around Modi, it’s not because he is some genius who will bring relief for the people of India. He is also a rude and incompetent man like other politicians.

But the people at large are so terrified with the current system of governance in India that they see a ray of hope in Modi because at this stage he is the only politician who has declared his candidature as the PM.

By that rule of thumb, people will even support a donkey if you tell them repeatedly that this donkey is the right choice for them. And using this rule, many more crooks are entering the Indian political arena to make hay while the sun shines.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), for example, is now trying to use every dirty trick to cheat people, stay in power, and eventually make a fast buck to spread its wings in all parts of the country.

Led by Arvind Kejriwal, AAP is making all sorts of false promises, telling lies, and joining forces with those whom it labeled as corrupt and communal. Why? To bamboozle the voters and grab political power.

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Given the circumstances, I can’t ask Indian people – and particularly voters – to be cautious in electing the politicians because people are driven by a dangerous fan culture in the country.

Without analyzing the capabilities of a person, commoners are blind fans of actors, cricketers, self-styled religious gurus, and politicians. They will again elect one such politician and keep suffering for the next five years.

So, if people of India are inviting disaster, then Modi – or any other PM for that matter – will deliver disaster. You don’t need a Manmohan Singh to predict that.

By Rakesh Raman, the managing editor of RMN Company.

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