Forbes - Riding high on unprecedented polling numbers and rapid economic growth, India's controversial Prime Minister Narendra Modi will give the keynote address at the opening session of the 48th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) this Tuesday. The WEF is the annual meeting of the world's great, good, or just plain rich held every January in Davos, Switzerland.
Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, is the star attraction. His American counterpart Donald Trump may or may not make it to Davos, due to the U.S. government shutdown. If he does go, the Swiss locals may not make himvery welcome, even if the WEF grandees can't very well turn him down. Modi, by contrast, is very much the man of the moment.
International relations weren't always so smooth for Modi, who in 2005 as Chief Minister of India's Gujarat state had his U.S. visa revoked and was denied permission to enter the country. The reason? He was allegedly implicated in fomenting (or at least failing to contain and condemn) inter-ethnic riots in 2002 that resulted in more than 1000 deaths. Think of it as "India's Charlottesville," only much, much worse.
In 2014, Modi was narrowly elected India's Prime Minister with just over half the seats in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of India's parliament), but less than one-third of the popular vote. India's first Twitter Prime Minister is widely reviled among the country's bickering intellectual elite. Modi, who rose from humble origins as a grocer's son, has been ridiculed as an uneducated chaiwala (tea seller), a label he has since embraced with pride.
Political pundits dismissed him as a knee-jerk populist who came to power by making simplistic promises of national revival. Modi stands accused of dog-whistle politics, endangering the nearly 40% of India's population that belongs to religious, ethnic, or regional minorities. He is regularly condemned as dangerous, a strongman, and adictator by Indian and Western elites.
And he is a huge success, both economically and politically. The economy is booming, and Narendra Modi is the most popular Indian leader since Mahatma Gandhi, both inside and outside the country.
Now a little more than midway through his five-year term, his job approval rating stands at 88%. If he really has oppressed 40% of the population, they must not be aware of it. ContinueReading
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