Narendra Modi & Amit Shah, Newsmakers Of The Year

The prime minister and his home minister dominated the Indian political landscape in 2019, setting a new, radical agenda for the country

- Raj Chengappa

Politics, like money, never sleeps. Nor does Narendra Modi. Or so it seemed in 2019 when the prime minister was perennially in fast-forward mode, working punishing hours even on holidays and setting a scorching pace that his colleagues and rivals found hard to match. On Christmas Day, for instance, he chose to launch the Atal Bhujal Yojana, aimed at improving groundwater levels in 8,300 villages in seven states. Modi may have turned 69 this September, but he remained indefatigable in pushing through a radically new national agenda that he and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had set in a year full of tumult, trials and tribulations.

Ironically, the year had begun on a bleak note for Modi. His political ratings were plummeting and the BJP had just lost the three crucial north Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh in December 2018 to the Congress. The economy was on a slippery slope, with GDP growth beginning to falter (it dropped dramatically in the next two quarters). There was much good that Modi had done on the social development front in his first term, including building millions of toilets, providing gas connections and housing for the rural masses. However, an adventurist demonetisation and poorly-executed reform such as the Goods and Services Tax (initially lauded for its good intention) had impacted employment adversely. It may have also resulted in what Arvind Subramanian, a former chief economic advisor to the Modi government, termed “the great slowdown of the Indian economy”.