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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Modi’s political boom is drowning out India’s economic gloom

Much of what Modi asked Indians to do in the name of ‘economic patriotism’ was sensible. But nobody makes a speech like that in good times. Crisis is looming on the horizon.

Do you feel bad for Sri Sri Ravi Shankar who has gone from being the famous-guru-of-the-very-rich to becoming a mere punchline on X every time the rupee touches a new low?

Gurudev (yes that is really his X handle) earned this notoriety when he tweeted “It is refreshing to know that the rupee will get stronger at Rs.40/- per dollar if Modi comes to power,” a few months before Narendra Modi actually came to power in 2014 and the rupee began its free fall.

As far as I know, the Holy One has never admitted that his all-seeing eye and far-reaching vision betrayed him in this instance. The best he has come up with is to say he had heard how the rupee would ascend along with Modi and posted his gloriously optimistic (if somewhat nonsensical) tweet entirely on that basis.

But why pick only on Double Sri? In the last days of the UPA, it had become fashionable for celebrities—all the way from Riteish Deshmukh to Amitabh Bachchan—to focus on the declining value of the rupee in their posts.

Of course there are no tweets on that subject now from those celebrities.

In the long run, the celebrity tweeters did Narendra Modi a disservice. Their tweets suggested that the value of the rupee was the true measure of the health of the economy. The economic reality is much more complicated than that. Even when the economy was generally regarded to be doing okay under PM Modi the rupee continued to descend.

But as the rupee’s decline continues nobody is pretending that the economy is doing well any

longer. The Prime Minister captured the nation’s attention when he called, during an address in Hyderabad, for a climate of austerity. He asked people not to buy gold, to stop organising weddings abroad, to cut down on foreign travel, and to work from home.

Much of what he asked Indians to do in the name of ‘economic patriotism’........

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