'The much touted Rs. 20 lakh crore relief package announced by Prime Minister Modi and detailed by the Union finance minister has turned out not to be a relief package at all. Instead of offering a fiscal stimulus, she has urged enterprises of all sizes to borrow from banks to tide over the immediate crisis. To millions of poor people staring at prolonged starvation, all she has offered is an additional allocation for the MNREGA programme.
'To Narendra Modi, Covid-19 is not so much a disease as a deus ex machina. Before he announced the largest lockdown in human history on 24 March, the Indian prime minister was submerged in a pool of self-engineered crises. Citizenly protests against his legislative disfigurement of Indian secularism had erupted in every major city, more than four dozen lives were devoured at his doorstep in February in the worst religious bloodletting in Delhi since the 1984, unemployment was soaring, and the economy was poised to post the slowest pace of growth in a decade.
'On May 26, 2014 there was a single venue where every powerbroker and political animal wanted to be: Rashtrapati Bhavan, where Narendra Modi was being sworn in as Prime Minister. At the ceremony, prominent in a black suit with a loopy silver bracelet dangling from his right wrist, was actor Salman Khan, sitting between his father, the legendary screenwriter Salim Khan, and Zafar Sareshwala, a car dealer from Gujarat.
