https://arab.news/ywbph
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become the longest-serving elected premier in India’s history, the government said on Wednesday as he crossed the record first set by the country’s founding Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Modi is marking 4,399 consecutive days in office since he took his first oath as India’s premier on May 26, 2014, surpassing Nehru’s 4,398-day tenure as an elected prime minister.
Though Nehru’s premiership is widely recognized since India gained independence in 1947, Modi’s achievement is counted from the country’s first national elections in 1952.
“Public service is the greatest measure of good governance,” Modi said in an X post on Wednesday.
“It is only the individual who works tirelessly with humility, dedication, and a sense of duty who earns the trust of the people.”
In 2024, Modi became the second Indian leader, after Nehru, to retain power for a third straight term, further cementing the power of his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has governed India over the last decade as part of the National Democratic Alliance.
Under the 75-year-old leader, India’s economy grew to $4.19 trillion by the end of last year, making it the fourth-largest in the world, overtaking Japan’s economy in terms of nominal gross domestic product.
In the last 12 years, Modi presided over major infrastructure developments and programs that lifted more than 250 million people out of absolute poverty, according to government data.
He also oversaw the signing of major free trade agreements, including with the UK, the UAE and Oman.
Modi crossed an “important milestone” that “places him ahead of all elected prime ministers of India,” said Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
“It is a testament to … the prime minister’s contribution to not only encouraging India to dream big and think big, but also to achieve goals and targets which were thought to be impossible earlier,” he told Arab News.
Gupta highlighted three nationwide campaigns launched by Modi’s government, which modernized India’s sanitation by constructing 120 million household toilets, providing 157 million tap water connections, and giving over 100 million people access to clean cooking gas.
These programs evoked “transformational changes” in the country, he said, adding that they are “changes which we Indians, which we as a nation should be proud about.”
But there have also been other major shifts in terms of democracy and society under Modi’s leadership, said veteran journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
Though sectors have recorded good progress throughout Modi’s leadership, such as banking becoming more available and inclusive to the public, there are also concerns over the state of the economy, where a “massive concentration of wealth” is in the hands of a few.
“Crony capitalism has been at its most (manifested) manner in the last 12 years … There is a completely lopsided economic development in the country. The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer,” Mukhopadhyay told Arab News.
He also cited concerns over the state of Indian democracy, which he said has “gone from bad to worse.”
India is “moving towards what many people are saying is an electoral autocracy, a totalitarian electoral state,” added Mukhopadhyay, who wrote Modi’s biography.
India was categorized as an “electoral autocracy” by various global publications on democracy, including the annual report published by the V-Dem Institute of the University of Gothenburg, which first marked the decline in 2019.
A champion of the Hindu majority, who make up 80 percent of India’s 1.4 billion population, Modi has been widely criticized for undermining India’s secular democracy with a majoritarian agenda, which has facilitated violent attacks by Hindu nationalists against minorities, particularly Muslims.
There is no Muslim representation in India’s current government.
“In the last 12 years, the final point is that society has moved from a certain level of unity to a complete total polarization on the lines of religious identity,” Mukhopadhyay said. “We have become a more communally polarized society.”
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