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by pavs 1796 days ago
They have been "growing" and "becoming" the next world leader for a while now.

Anyone who have lived in india long enough will tell you how far from the truth this is.

The only Stick India has, besides their nuclear arsenal, is the size of their domestic market (aka population). I dont think the purchasing power of their domestic market is that lucrative compare to actual superpowers (Economic or Military). Buy just large enough for International companies to bother to invest.

The whole political platform for Modi is religious fanaticism, nationalosm and jingoism. Any sane, rational Indian leader would not be so Anti international investment. (I am not only talking about the incident mentioned in this article, but generally speaking).

If you can look past the billionaires and the prosperous cities of India (however few), it eirily feels like the whole country is for most part still stuck in the 80s.

Most people tout india as the largest democracy with diverse relious population. The reality on the ground could not have been farther from truth.

In reality the country feels like its always in the state of experiment by their political leaders, competing with each other to find the best way to fuck things up without actually blowing up the country. Yet.

3 comments

To be fair, there was a strong bull case to be made for India till the early 2010s, especially in how well it recovered from the financial crisis.

The problem is that Modi has brought an insane blend of pre liberalization economic policy, centralized authoritarian control, and british inspired religion based divide and conquer policies that have set India back a couple of generations at least, possibly permanently if he remains in power and continues down this path.

> Any sane, rational Indian leader would not be so Anti international investment. (I am not only talking about the incident mentioned in this article, but generally speaking).

FDI has actually increased since Modi became the PM and he was been actively courting foreign companies. I don't understand how he is "Anti international investment".

Yeah Modi is pretty anti international investment, just look here since he got into power FDI has dropped in India by almost -100% https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/foreign-dire...

Also all the PLI schemes for companies are pretty anti international investment, so companies from Samsung to Apple are all investing big.

There are a lot of factors involved with all of that. I would argue that what has happened is that Modi's policies, even ones that might seem reasonable at the start like reforming the currency, have as executed ended up creating enormous difficulties for business in India and that investment has dropped primarily as a result of Indian business struggling amid their current circumstances.
Demonetization in 2016 turned out to be a horrible move, that backfired a bit, although I supported it when it came out.

GST implementation has been quite successful, FDI has increased since Modi came to power. The pandemic, of course, has been pretty bad, with the GDP contracting 8% in 2020.

FDI in India was $35 Billion when Modi came to power, and is >$50 Billion today. Are you being sarcastic?
Obviously: 'dropped by -100%' means 'increased by 100%'. Looks like you missed the minus sign.