Cut back to @ShekharGupta’s point about our love of a feel good guru.

Deep down we are a defeated, broken people in terms of our Sacred Geography, vastly diminished from what we think we were.

We are uniquely vulnerable to a demagogue who promises 2 restore past glory.

Our brief experience with the surge in growth thru liberalisation and the feel good & confidence that it generated convinced us that we could be great again. So we chose a brash, aggressive leader who embodies what we think we once were.

Economics + adrenaline. Very heady.

However, 7 years of more adrenaline and poor economics has reduced the economy to shambles. Protectionism, is an admission of defeat by our best entrepreneurs confessing inability to compete in global markets.

Atamnirbharta is a retreat into the defeatism of the 1970s.

Feel Good & demagoguery of the kind that initially spurred recovery & growth in Italy & Germany united the people. Dissenter were a tiny minority numbering less than 2 to 3% of population.

Modi’s demagoguery has divided India along both religious & caste lines.

Both in terms of economics & politics, India under Modi stands diminished than we were b4 2014. The truth becomes more difficult to paper over day by day.

Inevitably, feel good will clash with reality at some point. What needs to win for to progress is obvious.

But will it?

That’s the context in which you need to understand what happened in the US.

Trump may have scrapped through had the virus not opened the eyes of many Americans to Trump’s gross incompetence, fakery, lies, and false assumptions … whatever.

Reality triumphs; inevitably.

This wild conjecture from @ShekharGupta, that hardly rises above a naive assumption, but flies in the face of every prudent policy principle, attributing a foresight & genius to Modi & his advisers that is not apparent in what they do vis-a-vis China, is what disappoints me.

“While both have seen a drop in external trade in relation to GDP, the reasons are quite different - in China it is in part a problem of success, in India it points more to failure, writes T N Ninan”

https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/two-routes-to-atmanirbharta-why-both-china-and-india-are-looking-inwards-120110601589_1.html

As I said, Atamnirbharta is an admission of failure.