A year after he swept to power after a landslide victory for his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India's prime minister Narendra Modi faces growing dissatisfaction even among his own supporters. Mr Modi promised to kickstart economic growth; boost employment; improve health and education; and reform the public administration. The prime minister can point to the fact that India's economy is doing well, with annualised growth of 6 per cent of GDP and falling inflation. His supporters claim that Mr Modi's actions, such as liberalising rules on foreign investment, have been instrumental in putting India on track to overtake China as the world's fastest growing big economy.
For his detractors, India’s economic performance owes more to the fall in oil prices than to any government initiatives. Some business leaders who cheered Mr Modi’s rise now grumble that he has been too timid in his reforms and too slow to make efficiencies in India’s vast public bureaucracy. Others complain that he has failed to make progress on his ambitious goals of improving sanitation and provide toilets for half the population. India’s Muslim and Christian minorities, nervous about Mr Modi’s close links to extremist Hindu nationalists, have won little reassurance during his first year in office. Hindu organisations affiliated to the BJP have forcibly converted poor Muslims to Hinduism under a “returning home” campaign, churches have been vandalised, reportedly by Hindu groups, and atrocities against Christians include the gang-rape of a 71-year-old nun in eastern India. Mr Modi’s feeble response to such incidents suggests that he is still unwilling to dissociate himself from his more radical supporters.
If Mr Modi has disappointed expectations on the domestic front, he has surpassed them in foreign policy, moving swiftly to strengthen India's alliances with the United States, Japan and Australia while seeking to improve relations with China. Despite the grumbling at home, Mr Modi remains his country's towering political figure, not least because of the enduring weakness of the discredited opposition Congress Party.