India's problems were always bigger than Modi, started much before 2014

Long before Modi came to power in 2014, the country's economy had already developed its unhealthy dependence on finance, corruption and inequality were intolerable

A new narrative about India is suddenly emerging. Until very recently, India appeared a great democracy as well as a rising economic power, a potential partner of the West in its policy of containing China. Writing in Time magazine in 2015, no less a moral and political authority than Barack Obama hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi as India’s “reformer-in-chief” who “reflects the dynamism and potential of India’s rise.”

However, the latest, radically different narrative about India holds that the country is flailing, its politics and civil society captured by a Hindu supremacist movement, and its economy trapped in a potentially