An odd thing happened when I heard the Prime Minister tell the Lok Sabha that we must cherish those who create wealth for India. I remembered one big reason why I was once an ardent supporter of Narendra Modi. When he then added that it was wrong to believe that officials were the only people capable of running the public sector’s aged, profitless companies, my sense of an epiphany grew. Modi used to say things like this often before he became Prime Minister. Most memorably he said, ‘The government has no business to be in business’.
As someone convinced that India would have eliminated extreme poverty decades ago if we had allowed a real market economy to grow, instead of sticking to the Nehruvian socialist path, I believed Modi deserved a chance. It is India’s bad luck that in his first term he seemed to forget the economic ideas he had once espoused. He veered…