Political risk consultancy firm – The Eurasia Group has claimed that India under Narendra Modi is the fifth biggest geopolitical risk of 2020. Indian PM Modi has been in the line of fire from opponents over abrogation of 370 from Jammu and Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Bill.
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The consultancy’s annual Top 10 Risks of the year list is considered one of the foremost geopolitical indicators among global investors multinational firms and various financial and business consultancies.
Indian PM Narendra Modi has spent much of his second term promoting controversial social policies at the expense of an economic agenda. The impacts will be felt in 2020 with intensified communal and sectarian instability as well as foreign policy and economic setbacks said the Eurasia Group’s report.
Titled India gets Modi-fied the analysis has been co-authored by the president of Eurasia Group Ian Bremmer. Its a change of position for Bremmer who had earlier argued that Modi is India’s best hope for economic reform in the May 2019 edition of Time magazine the same edition in which author Aatish Taseer had called Modi Divider-in-Chief.
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Eurasia’s report talks about how since his re-election in May 2019 Modi’s government has adopted a contentious social agenda which not only comes at the cost of India’s economy but also challenges the secular and democratic foundations of the republic.
PM Modi and his government have been busy in recent months. They revoked the special status for Jammu and Kashmir and implemented a system to identify illegal immigrants in the northeast stripping 1.9 million people of citizenship Bremmer and co-author Cliff Kupchan write.
The government also passed a law that for the first time makes religion a criterion for migrants from neighbouring countries to formally acquire Indian citizenship, the authors say. The report says that Home Minister Amit Shah is responsible for this radical policy shift. Behind these moves is Amit Shah the former head of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) now home minister, it says.
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The authors note that protests have spread around India due to citizens fear of India losing its secular identity. But regardless of growing protests, Modi will not back down, they maintain.
Bremmer and Kupchan say that the Modi government’s social agenda will also have harmful effects on India’s foreign policy. Its actions on human rights will be under closer scrutiny by many nations and its reputation will take a hit they say, adding that changing attitudes in the US Congress towards India are likely to further impede US-India ties.
In terms of the economy, the report argues that under Modi the economic nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) the BJP’s ideological fount has become increasingly powerful. An empowered RSS means that Modi has less room to manoeuvre on structural reforms just as the economy is starting to sputter with quarterly growth falling to a six-year low of 4.5 per cent and forward-looking indicators looking softer still, it says.
The report says the RSS influence was evident in Modi’s decision to drop out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership negotiations last year and will be a big reason why India is unlikely to rejoin in 2020.
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The report concludes by stating that a weakened economy will, in turn, feed further economic nationalism and protectionism weighing on India’s troubled course in 2020. The top three risks on the list are increasingly unstable US domestic politics under President Donald Trump decoupling of US and China in the technology sphere and hostile US-China relations.
