THE MODI MANTRA

There is not a single head of state in the world whose leadership has not been tested by the Covid-19 pandemic. Confronted with a crisis of unparalleled magnitude, these leaders will either make or break their reputations on their ability to successfully guide their nations through these troubled times. As the US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr once said, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in the moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

The burden weighs even more heavily on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s shoulders as he faces a dangerous trinity of threats: the health emergency caused by Covid-19, the economic distress it has caused an already slowing economy and the Chinese aggression on our borders. Yet, so far, he seems to have weathered this triple onslaught rather well. The latest round of the INDIA TODAY-Karvy Insights biannual Mood of the Nation survey shows that the prime minister’s popularity has soared to an unprecedented level. A phenomenal 78 per cent of those polled have rated his performance as good to outstanding as compared to 71 per cent in the MOTN survey of August 2019. (This was soon after he was re-elected a second time with a handsome majority in the May 2019 general election.) In fact, in the past five years, Modi’s personal popularity in the MOTN polls has never been as high as it is now despite the serious woes the country faces.

Reiterating the support for Modi, the poll shows that if elections were to be held now, the BJP would still command a comfortable majority on its own with 283 seats—though it would be 20 seats down from the 303 it won in the 2019 general election. The results are a boost for Modi because in the MOTN poll of January 2020, the BJP tally had fallen to 271—one short of a simple majority on its own in the Lok Sabha. The NDA’s projected tally too has gone up from 303 to 316 but it is still far).