Modi schemes have no action plan: Tharoor

Answering a question from a student over the success of Modi’s new schemes, Tharoor said, “Mr Modi’s speeches, rhetoric and soundbites are all fine, but if you read what I have been writing in the last 20 years through my books, it looks as if Modi’s scriptwriter has read them too. And I am a liberal. But I have two problems with him, one being that he announces these schemes without any mention of them in the budget or tangible action plan. I accepted the Swachh Bharat mission as a citizen of the country because the PM asked me to and cleaned up a lake area in my constituency and even donated a biogas plant for recycling waste. But what after that? I had written to him about a follow-up… Swachh Bharat has no budget. This second scheme, whereby he has asked every MP to adopt a village, has been started with no real infrastructure chalked out for it. These are all existing UPA schemes. Labels are fine, but it appears to be a ‘name-changing government’ rather than a ‘game-changing government’.”

Tharoor added, “My other problem is that he is dependent on a political party to fulfil his liberal reforms, which is the antithesis of it and for that he needs ‘storm troopers’ like the RSS. He needs them in order to win polls. They have even held up Rajya Sabha which is still debating on issues like ghar wapsi. It is important for Mr Modi who is promising liberal set of reforms to stop these people who are undoing what he has set out to do and to make them stop their excesses. He is promising to bring in a liberal set of reforms, riding on the back of the people who are fundamentally illiberal. While eight months is a short time, he needs to do more to win over the sceptics like me and the educated middle class.”

The MP, whose new book India Shastra was launched Saturday, touched upon various facets of his life ranging from India’s dynastic politics to lack of privacy for a politician, courting controversies, his stint at the UN and his writing.

Speaking about his own political calling, Tharoor exhorted management students to get into politics and play an active role in the transformation of India. The MP also revealed how he had also got through the coveted IIM-Ahmedabad and IIM-Calcutta way back in 1975 when there were only two IIMs.