An Intermedial Retrospective

The book, 'Indian Renaissance: The Modi Decade', edited by Aishwarya Pandit has essays from 26 people and a Foreword by Nirmala Sitharaman, the country's Finance Minister.

- ABHINAV AGARWAL

BENGALURU B etween 1989 and 1998, India saw five general elections and six Prime Ministers.

In the 20 years from 2004 to 2024, India saw two coalitions govern in tenyear stints each. While the UPA coalition was led by the Congress party, but which didn't have a majority in the Lok Sabha, from 2014 to 2024 the NDA was led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which commanded an absolute majority in both terms. It was led by Narendra Modi, who was the undisputed leader of the party, unlike the UPA's Manmohan Singh, who was described by Sanjaya Baru as an "accidental prime minister".

Ten years is a long enough period to take a pause and do a retrospective of sorts.

The book, "Indian Renaissance: The Modi Decade", edited by Aishwarya Pandit from the Jindal Global Law School, attempts to do just that, with essays from 26 people, an Introduction by Aishwarya Pandit, and a Foreword by Nirmala Sitharaman, the country's Finance Minister.

The first essay is by Tony Abbott, Australia's 28th Prime Minister from 2013-2015, and rightly points out that the global future's luminescence will be determined by India's choosing to participate in world events beyond the border, or not. In an admission that is a rarity for western leaders, he points out the absurdity of India being free despite its poverty and yet ranking "well down the global democracy lists.... Sadly, faith in God and country is pretty rare in Western think thanks, which is why they often find India's democracy easier to caricature than to understand." Avatans Kumar's essay is civilizational in scope.

It highlights a very important change in the Indian mindset that has emerged in the 10 years from 2014 from being mired in what Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul called "full of piestic Gandhian gloom" in the 1970s, to what Prof Subhash Kak calls the "abandonment of the old apologetic tone when speaking about [Indian] culture" is an unmistakable change in the last 10 years.