Bharat is currently at an interesting juncture where despite global turmoils and geopolitical uncertainties, its economic growth has been quiet resilient and similarly its stature in the world is at an all time high. Stability in any country is a direct consequence of its leadership—confident, assertive and motivated leaders provide the necessary base for development whereas confused, weak and corrupt leadership holds the country back from growing rapidly. In this context, the last decade has been a transformative one for India where across all the domains, the country has immensely benefited from the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is this transformation that Academic-Author Arjun Singh Kadian’s latest book, ‘The Modi Disruption’ captures in a succinct way.
The book opens with the interesting premise that the first-time voter in 2024 Lok Sabha Elections would have been just a 8 or a 10-year-old child in 2014, the year Modi became PM for the first time. For that voter, understanding the key changes that country has witnessed between 2014-2024 would be difficult to fathom, provided he or she would never understand the plights of the pre-2014 era. It is for this vast section of youth that Kadian has weaved a lucid narrative, capturing the essential changes that have taken place under PM Modi.
To make his point, the author has borrowed the concept of ‘disruptive innovation’ given by American academic Clayton Christensen for corporate settings and has applied it beautifully to the political setup of the country. By using the concept across the domains of foreign policy, health care, diaspora management, sports, infrastructure and the Indic cultural renaissance, Kadian argues that Modi’s tenure in power has been nothing short of a total disruption of old ways in order to reject what was redundant and embrace what is essential for the rise of India. The story as told by him opens right from the foundation of Jan Sangha and its later year avtar of the Bhartiya Janata Party whom Modi has turned into a political behemoth.
Indeed, there are many sobriquets that PM Modi has earned due to his game-changing policy decisions, his hands-on style of governance and his focus on making India count at the global level but Kadian has handed him out a new and unique one by calling him as the ‘Disruptor in Chief’. Here some of the anecdotes that Arjun has told to explain Modi’s style of functioning or to explain the apathy that India faced in the pre-2014 era truly stand out. This includes the one about Babus in foreign policy dispensation who wiped off tika off their forehead driven by an inferiority complex towards their Hindu roots in the past or the one about an Olympic medal winner who was ignored by the government of the day and was forced to live the life as a destitute. On the other hand, today’s India is marked by an unparalleled sense of pride in one’s roots as well as a position of dignity for everyone alike.
What also makes Kadian’s work resonate with the readers is his emphasis on telling the story through compelling data points that have provided a firm basis to his arguments all throughout the book. Some of the insights are completely fresh especially for young readers who are not well-versed with India’s domestic politics yet. The book will serve as a great addition to their knowledge base and would also be a great entry point into the vast world of domestic politics. The book is also a must read for policy practitioners, civil services aspirants as well as the wider general audience. I particularly enjoyed the section on new narratives that Modi’s political success has enabled to come to fore. Unlike the past when Marxist narratives dominated country’s discourse, the book notes how eclectic the intellectual landscape has become in the last ten years.
This book is Kadian’s third and the first one where he has attempted to write on a topic this vast. Capturing the events that have unfolded in the last decade was no easy task. But the good news is that he has done a fantastic job. New-age publishing houses such as the BluOne Ink must also be congratulated for publishing so many diverse and right-aligned voices since its inception. This book which is a short and engaging read is another feather in their cap and we also hope Kadian soon comes up this next.
