Embarrassingly, this negative verdict appeared just as the ruling party was marking the sixth anniversary of Narendra Modi's becoming Prime Minister. Meanwhile, two senior Delhi columnists independently wrote sober assessments of his tenure. Both had once hoped that Modi would be an economic reformer; both felt disappointed that he had turned out otherwise. Writing in The Indian Express, Tavleen Singh thought that these failures were largely the consequence of the premature death of Arun Jaitley, after which (or so she claimed), "Suddenly, the priorities and the image of the government changed dramatically." Writing in The Print, Shekhar Gupta laid the blame at the feet of the IAS officers who advised Modi, whom he saw as cautious and risk-averse, unlike the "stellar team of civil servants" who had advised previous Prime Ministers such as Narasimha Rao and Atal Behari Vajpayee.
My own analysis is very different. Narendra Modi has been a disappointment as a Prime Minister not because he has bad advisers or because some good advisers died relatively young, but because of his own faults and failings. There are three character traits in particular that help explain why, despite the two resounding electoral mandates he has won, Narendra Modi has not been able to deliver the sort of progress on the economic front that his supporters had once thought he would.
The first trait is the suspicion of experts and expertise. As a self-made man, who has risen to the top on the basis of his own intelligence, his own drive, and his own will-power, Modi is suspicious of those with formal qualifications from elite institutions. His statement that he preferred "hard work to Harvard" was a striking manifestation of this belief. In truth, the second does not preclude the former; had Abhijit Banerjee not worked so industriously after securing a PhD from Harvard, he would never have won a Nobel Prize for economics. Good governance needs both focused energy as well as expert knowledge. The disaster of demonetization - which set the Indian economy back many years - could have been avoided if the Prime Minister had listened to the professional advice of the (MIT-educated) Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. More recently, the fall-out of the COVID-19 pandemic would have been far less serious had the Prime Minister based his policies on the advice of the country's top epidemiologists rather than on his own penchant for the spectacular and the dramatic.
The second trait, which is related to the first, is the cult of personality that the Prime Minister has built around himself. As a technocrat who has worked with the PM once told me, the rule that all advisers have to observe is "total obsequiousness, no credit". The line with which the Prime Minister fought and won the 2019 elections, 'Modi Hai toh Mumkin Hai', says it all. Only Modi will defeat terrorism, Modi and Modi alone will humiliate Pakistan (and now China), Modi by himself will eliminate corruption, Modi will surely make India the Vishwa Guru - this is the sort of thinking that is ubiquitous within the ruling party and the central government. But a large and complex country like India cannot be governed effectively and well through the force of one person's will - however farsighted and hardworking that individual might be.
For all the confidence and strength he exudes, the behaviour of the Prime Minister suggests that he is, within himself, a somewhat insecure man. This is evident not just in his reluctance to publicly praise his ministers or advisers when they do a good job, but also in the sort of people he relies on for advice. The preponderance of Gujarat cadre officers around him and in positions of influence in the central government is one sign. A second is his tendency to shun some outstanding IAS officers, merely because they once held important positions in Congress governments. Even within the top ranks of the IAS, loyalty to the Leader, and not the quality of one's intellect, is what the Modi Government prizes most.
Back in 2013-14, when Narendra Modi launched his campaign to become Prime Minister, he was enthusiastically endorsed by many Indians not otherwise inclined to the Hindutva ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Disgusted by the corruption and cronyism of the Congress regime, they saw Modi as a dynamic economic reformer, an Indian Deng Xiaoping, who would unleash the forces of entrepreneurial dynamism. They were impressed by his energy, by his being self-made, and, of course, by his oratory. And they took at face value his claim that he had put his RSS past behind him.