When you look at India in the 2 decades before 2014, what you see are govts that prioritized economic development & consequently, our global standing. The only blip on this steady progress was the Gujarat pogrom. The steady accumulation of global heft has now been mostly used up.
Starting from 2014, we not merely took our eyes off the economy, we proactively damaged it through political decisions like #Demon. Then we made a mess of our society for deliberate political polarisation. On top of that, we made wrong bets and took our eyes off the border too.
The physical, social, cultural & trust-related capital that we built up internally and globally ever since the liberalisation of 1991 has well and truly been squandered for petty domestic political wins. Until we realize this, learn our lessons & course-correct, we can't fix it.
We have lived off our accumulated capital in the last six years, without adding to it in any sense. Not in an economic sense. Not in a cultural sense. Not in the military sense. Not in the soft power sense. Not in the social trust & harmony sense. Not in the Institutional sense.
When you get your thugs to perform lynchings, when you jail your opponents without reason, when you cripple the key Institutions of democracy and then claim that India has always been a secular democratic country, you are living off the accumulated capital of the past.
