Narendra Modi at his party office in Gandhinagar
resident of 7, Race Course Road. In NarendraModi, India has found the perfect embodiment of its collective as-piration: Of redeeming its place on the global political high table and restoring its status as one of the world's most wanted economies. Buffeted by five years of slackening growth, weakened leadership and scam-tainted public life, Modi is an idea whose time has come. A stunning proportion of 814 million voters, one-fifth of them voting for the first time, have vested their faith in the lifelong pracharak and former railway station tea vendor. They have endorsed his promise to deliver good governance and development, sweeping aside naysayers who spared no effort to arouse the deepest anxieties and darkest fears possible, from Hindu majoritarianism to crony capitalism. They have, for the first time since they bought into the belief of Rajiv Gandhi's modernism, given a powerful mandate to reshape the idea of India. They have surrendered to his triumph of will, and watched in admiration and awe as he first won over his party and then the nation, making BJP a force to reckon with nationally.A new politics of India first
Now he has to deliver. It is a challenge Modi is equal to. For, the four-term chief minister of Gujarat doesn't want to merely govern the country, he wants to remake it. There are two fundamental parts to this. One is the crafting of a new kind of pluralism, says political analyst Sadanand Dhume, which rejects the conventional "skull-cap secularism" practised by the Congress.
This pluralism embraces India First and is epitomised by Modi touching the feet of Colonel Nizamuddin, Subhash Chandra Bose's driver, during an Azamgarh rally. It challenges one of the holiest pieties of Indian politics and the vote bank of his principal opponents. The second aspect of reinvention of the nation is the centre-staging of the economic agenda. In this, he will have to keep the Sangh Parivar's cowdung capitalists at bay with an occasional sop like stopping FDI in retail. His first commitment will be to those, especially the desperate and dispirited young, who have elected him with a historic mandate and want him as the champion of free market and spirited entrepreneurship. He has often said he knows what it is to be poor, and has experienced the utter desperation to escape that condition.
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