There are 17 CM’s to Gujarat from Independence till now. Till Modi became CM in the year 2001, the longest CM tenure is that of Hitendra Desai from 1965 to 1971, a period of 6 years. Only another CM Madhav Solanki has completed 5 years as CM from 1980 to 1985. Modi completed a tenure of about 13 years before he moved over to the Centre. He is PM till now, which means he had been the Head of Governments for 19 years now.
Modi is the only CM (of the bigger states) of India who comes from a poor family. He had no family support and is a self made man. He has worked from the level of a Karyakarta slowly and rose to be the PM of India today.
The criticism against him is that Gujarat was already a developed state when he took over. But then why did the people of Gujarat prefer to have him as a CM for so long. There must be something special in him that made him win the people’s confidence. Even today he is the PM and continues to be so till 2024, and perhaps even beyond if the opposition is not able to put up a good candidate against him.
Modi does not want to accumulate money, and neither does he allow his fellow party men to do so by unfair means of office. He does not favor any family members as all our politicians do.
What are Modi’s weaknesses? The two weaknesses I see in Modi are
1. Despite not being strong on Hinduism himself, after becoming PM Modi tries to accommodate the RSS, his parent outfit. We may or may not agree with their views but the minorities form a large percentage of our population and so steps should be taken by him to see that they do not feel threatened. They consist of 20% of our population and their views cannot be suppressed. In the earlier times the Congress appeased them and the anger of our people on that issue helped the BJP and made it into a strong party and it rules the country today. The minorities should not be appeased, but on the other side they also should not feel threatened.
2. Modi’s ideas are excellent but their implementation looks flawed, so he has to pick up better advisors. We have seen this during Demonitization.
Other than these factors I don’t see anything bad in Modi.
Some people say his attitude is dictatorial. Maybe so, but I feel that is an asset and not a liability in India. We require a strong centre because even now there are many flaws in our systems and drastic reforms are required. Whenever a reform is taken up some entrenched sections of people would always have to lose despite a large majority getting benefited. In such radical reforms, the sections that would lose are affluent and highly vociferous and so would create a lot of resistance. Such reforms need a PM that goes ahead and does it without bothering about criticism from some sections of people.
Some people say he favors the Corporate Sector, but his actions do not support that opinion. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code brought in by Modi goes radically against this belief. As per this any Creditor and not just a Banker can appeal to the IBC board, if the company has not paid their dues for liquidation of the company. In liquidation, the assets of the company are sold off and the amount so recovered is apportioned to the creditors. A strict time frame is set for this law. The IBC Board has a time of 14 days to decide whether a company is to be liquidated or not as per the plea. Thereafter the Board is given a time of only 180 days extendable by another 90 days. So hardly about 1 year to finish the process.
This is a powerful law and some Corporates have already been liquidated on this law. The first big case to be done so is that of Essar Steel in Dec 2019, which was sold to Arcelor Mittal & Nippon Steel for Rs 42000 crores. This has recovered huge NPA of a consortium of banks. So what Modi has, is not love for Corporates, but it is for what they deliver to the country by way of output and employment. If the deviate from the legal path, they would also get punished.
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