Why 2024 Could be an Inflection Year for India and Modi
News 182023 was an exceptional year for India: A successful G20 presidency; Chandrayan-3’s moon landing near the lunar south pole, a global first; and an economy growing at 7 per cent in a world hit by recession and torn by wars in Ukraine and Gaza. He writes: “Muslims are 15 per cent of the population but only 4.9 per cent of state and central government employees, 4.6 per cent of the paramilitary forces, 3.2 per cent of IAS, IFS and IPS and, perhaps, as low as 1 per cent of the Army.” The columnist doesn’t add that Muslims account for nearly 30 per cent of jail inmates but form less than 1 per cent of start-up founders. Exhibit three: On the same editorial page again, a former BBC India correspondent calls the three new crime bills legislated last week “a reversion to the colonial police that Kripal Dhillion wrote about.” Several clauses in the new crime legislation remove draconian elements in the 150-year-old criminal codes written for a colonised country by its coloniser. At a GDP growth rate of 7 per cent in 2023-24, India is the world’s fastest-growing major economy.