Achche din? Not with the state as a doer

A year after the Modi government started announcing various schemes, thinker and writer Arun Shourie described the government as "UPA (United Progressive Alliance, led by the Congress) plus cow"

For the 2014 elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had put out two versions of its election manifesto, a detailed one and a shorter one. I had placed the shorter one on my laptop’s main screen. I thought I would track India’s transformation as it unfolds, given that we were promised a different government — a “minimum government with maximum governance.” About six months later, I deleted it. I noticed that we only had a change of leadership and but no structural difference in the way the government intended to function.

Indeed, over the following years, things worsened. In the first