'Bullish nation': Veteran journalist Fareed Zakaria says India is 'brimming with excitement' after recent visit

Veteran Indian-American journalist, political commentator and author Fareed Zakaria recently visited the country, and said that he was struck by how optimistic the nation was amid growing global concerns. 

The journalist, on his CNN show, Fareed Zakaria GPS - Global Public Square, spoke about India’s growth and the revolutions that are clearing the path for the growth. “I’m just back from India and what I saw there was a bullish nation, brimming with excitement.  It has some hurdles to clear, but I lay out a path for it to truly become an incredible India,” he said in a tweet, along with a clip on the India segment. 

“Visiting India this week, I was struck by how different the mood was there compared to much of the world. While people in the US and Europe are worried about inflation and a possible recession, Indians are excited about the future. India is now the most populous country on the planet, and is projected to be its fastest-growing large economy as well at 5.9 per cent this year,” he said. 

Zakaria quoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi who recently said, “India’s time has arrived”. He said that he worries that he has seen this movie before. In 2006, when he had gone to Davos for the World Economic Forum, he saw billboards of ‘Incredible India’ plastered all over the small Swiss town. 

“In fact, in those years, India was growing even faster than now at more than 9 per cent. The Indian trade minister said that India would soon overtake China. It didn’t quite work out that way. After a few years, growth petered out, economic reforms stalled and many foreign businesses that had entered the country with great enthusiasm were disappointed. Some left altogether,” he added. 

The journalist said that while it did not work then, this time he came back from the trip and was bullish about India. “While the enthusiasm in the mid-2000s did not entirely translate, the country continued to make progress and became the second-fastest large growing economy after China for 20 years,” he said. 

Zakaria said that there are certain revolutions that has helped accelerate the nation’s growth. “The first was the Aadhaar revolution….Aadhaar enrolment is open to everyone and free but its most distinctive feature is that it is publicly-owned and operated, unlike in the West, where digital platforms like Google or Facebook are privately operated monopolies that can share your data to make a profit,” he said. 

“The second is the Jio revolution. Mukesh Ambani, India’s biggest and most ambitious business leader made a staggering $46 billion bet that by offering cheap phones and data packages he could get most Indians on the internet. It worked. Over 700 million Indians now use the Internet,” said Zakaria. 

The third revolution, Zakaria said, was infrastructure. “The third is an infrastructure revolution that is readily apparent to anyone visiting India. Spending on roads, airports, train stations and other such projects has exploded. Government capital spending has risen 5 folds since fiscal year 2014,” he added.

“These three revolutions could truly, this time, transform India but they can do so by helping in the country’s greatest challenge – bringing in hundreds of millions of Indians who are still on the margins economically, socially and politically,” he said. 

Zakaria said that an even larger challenge of inclusivity is around Indian women, who are still pressured in various ways not to work outside the house. “A focus on inclusivity would also transform India’s religious tensions, bringing into the fold India’s Muslims, roughly 200 million people, a 7th of the country, who face persistent persecution,” he added. 

“India has the potential to be admired not just for the quantity of its growth but also the quality of its values. And that would truly be an ‘Incredible India’,” he concluded the segment.

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