What do Foreigners Feel About Current Indian PM Modi?

 

For a European like me, it's rather complicated to get a grasp of Indian politics just by reading the news, and it's even harder to form a comprehensive and unbiased opinion. This is true for any country in the world, of course, but I believe that India, because of her historical background together with her unique social, linguistic and religious structure, sets a world record in this regard. 

As I strongly believe that politics is an excellent tool to get to know more about a country, I decided to take advantage of my recent trip to beautiful Goa/Karnataka/Kerala, last February, to gather information from what I thought to be the most trustable and direct source —the people.

I decided that whenever I had a chance, I would talk to people and ask them their opinion about the current Indian political system and, specifically, about Modi and his government. I asked the same questions to tuk-tuk drivers and businessmen, to bartenders and hotel managers, to passengers on a bus and people I met in the streets or on a beach, to farmers, students, professionals, to the incredibly wealthy and to the very poor. "What do you think about Modi? Is he doing good for India or not?". I relentlessly asked those same questions to Indians of all religions and castes, carefully looking for people coming from different parts of the country.

How naive of me.

If you, reader, are an Indian, you must be laughing at this moment because you already know what happened.

I came up to nothing.

In the moment that I thought I had understood a very tiny bit of something, the next interview duly contradicted it. Amazingly, I couldn't find a single cluster of population that was consistently and univocally in favor or against Modi's political measures. I heard everything and the opposite of everything. There are one billion and three hundred million Indians. But it seems that this is nothing compared to the number of opinions you can happen to hear.

In the end, there are just four things I can say that I am (almost) certain about.

1) In a way or another, Modi has created a breakthrough within Indian society, shaking it by the roots, and it seems to me that he has somehow re-awakened the interest in politics of most Indian citizens. Very rarely did I meet someone who refused to answer my questions or didn't hold an opinion.

2) Fragmentation and polarization are the two key elements of the scenario. Not surprisingly, people are not just simply polarized in the classical "I love him/I hate him". But what amazed me is that the polarization seems to be spread across each and every action of the government in an inconsistent and unpredictable fashion across the different layers of Indian society.

3) Whatever opinion I can have about Modi can be easily proved wrong.

Source - Internet
Aldo Cernuto