India's two looming challenges

Government's New Year resolutions should be to revive domestic demand while addressing the Chinese threat

Calendar year 2020 will end in a week and will remain etched in collective memory due to the devastation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. As of mid-December 2020, there were about 1.7 million deaths globally because of this virus and it could even take a decade for economies around the world to get back to trend growth. The year also saw communist China make its deep-rooted hostility towards India abundantly clear. It was not politic but the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was prescient in alluding to the Chinese threat when justifying the nuclear tests of May 1998.

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