India's prime minister Narendra Modi faces his first major appraisal this weekend when his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government presents its first full federal budget, nine months after coming to power.
The budget on Saturday is crucial for Mr Modi’s government, as it needs to counter a rising level of disenchantment with a prime minister seemingly high on promises, rhetoric and flamboyance but low on delivery and accomplishment.
This disillusionment was highlighted this month when the BJP won just three of 70 seats in New Delhi’s legislative assembly elections, having secured all seven of the capital’s parliamentary constituencies last May.
The fledgling Aam Aadmi Party, or Common Man’s Party, humiliated the BJP by securing a record 67 assembly seats on a promise of participatory and accountable governance and a corruption-free administration, all assurances that Mr Modi had earlier pledged.
Not having experienced an electoral setback since 2001, Mr Modi staked his personal reputation on winning the city-states polls and consequently pitched his grandly choreographed campaign on his own persona and his government’s questionable achievements.
This approach backfired, badly. For despite Mr Modi’s promise of impending “good days” with his BJP government, everyday living has become dearer, unemployment is soaring, women remain unsafe and vulnerable and healthcare and education remain elusive for most.
Regardless of the prime minister's vaunted "Clean India" campaign, mountains of garbage proliferate across India, pollution is choking the country and reducing longevity, and corruption and public harassment by state officials continues.
The setbacks are not limited to the everyday lives of ordinary Indians.
Leading Indian banker Deepak Parekh declared last week that businessmen were becoming impatient with Mr Modi; nothing much had changed on the ground since the decade-long rule of the ineffective and nepotistic Congress Party-led government, which the BJP swept out of power last May.
Mr Modi’s administration, Mr Parekh stated, had done little to vindicate its promise of loosening bureaucratic norms to make it easy to do business in India, to grow the economy through infrastructure development and attract foreign direct investment into the country.
India remains ranked 134 out of 189 countries on the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business index, below Nicaragua, Uganda and Yemen.
Budget expectations
Consequently, expectations are high that the upcoming budget will provide a roadmap as to how the government plans to deliver on its lofty poll promises of social development and placating agitated investors.
The government has also promised to meet the aspirations of a restive young population, given that over 65 per cent of India’s 1.25 billion people are below the age of 35.
“Ushering in the promised good days is more complex than catchy alliterations,” the Hindustan Times said in an editorial, referring to the prime minister’s rhetorical habits.
Overseas interest
Mr Modi has generated a buzz overseas in the hitherto moribund India story with his showmanship, oratory and sartorial indulgences.
He paid successful back-to-back visits to Japan, the US and Australia as well as hosting Chinese premier Xi Jinping and US president Barack Obama, among other world and regional leaders.
Mr Obama was the first US president to be the chief guest at the showcase Republic Day military parade in Delhi in January, and the only one to visit India twice.
However, potential investments by all these countries remain predicated on the BJP government establishing an environment that is free from corruption and out-of-date bureaucratic procedures.
Social tensions
Social and sectarian tensions have multiplied under Mr Modi’s rule, as proselytising Hindu hardline groups, closely associated with the BJP, have taken to carrying out Muslim conversions. Churches have also been vandalised in Delhi and other cities.
Several BJP MPs have added to the turbulence by publicly calling upon Hindus - who comprise over 82 per cent of the country - to produce four or more children each, to offset traditionally larger Muslim families. Muslims constitute about 15 per cent of India’s population.
At an election rally in Delhi in December, federal minister Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti declared that those who were not Hindus were simply "haramzade", or "bastards".
The head of the powerful Hindu revivalist organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which provides spiritual guidance to the BJP, has repeatedly declared that India can only be unified through Hindutva, or Hindu hegemony.
“We need to ensure one language, one God and one religion,” RSS head Mohan Bhagwat stated at a recent rally.
One of the BJP’s closest and oldest allies, the Shiv Sena party of Mumbai, wants the words “secular” and “socialist” removed from the preamble to the Indian constitution, deeming them to be meaningless and archaic.
“Modi’s silence on these issues is not surprising as he owes his premiership to the RSS cadres who campaigned for him during last year’s parliamentary elections,” political analyst Seema Mustafa said. The RSS now believes it is payback time for the prime minister, Ms Mustafa said.
Mr Modi is an RSS member, having been enrolled in his teens. The strident dogmatism of the organisation is amplified by obscurantism perpetuated by senior leaders.
Mr Modi recently told an audience of doctors and scientists in Mumbai that plastic surgery, genetic science and stem cell study existed thousands of years ago in ancient India. He said that was how the Hindu god Ganesha’s elephant head was attached to a human body and how the warrior god Kartikeya was born outside his mother’s womb.
In the same vein, other BJP supporters told the 102nd edition of the Indian Science Congress in Mumbai in January that motor cars, aircraft and space vehicles capable of interplanetary travel existed millennia ago.
The party members said that warring kings had even left behind a helmet on Mars that Nasa scientists had stumbled upon.
Meanwhile, Rahul Gandhi, the deputy leader of the opposition Congress Party, has taken an unexplained “vacation” from politics just ahead of the critical budget session that began earlier this week.
Little or nothing is known of Mr Gandhi’s intentions, as a veil of secrecy surrounds all members of the Congress Party’s Gandhi-Nehru dynasty.
But political and media circles speculate that the 44-year-old is either sulking in the hope of being offered the presidency of the Congress Party, led by his mother Sonia Gandhi, or retiring from public life.
