Caution and Narendra Modi.

• Author: Dorschner, Jon P.

The Modi wave has swept across India and is still ongoing. In the 2014 Parliamentary elections Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 282 seats, gaining an absolute majority in parliament, while the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) spearheaded by the Congress Party suffered a devastating defeat, losing 162 seats. The Congress Party was reduced to only 44 seats.

The BJP wants to ride this wave to gain absolute majorities in all Indian states and intends to create a "Congress free India." So far, it has worked. The BJP won absolute majorities in legislative elections in Haryana and Maharashtra on October 15, and intends to engineer similar outcomes in current legislative elections in Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir.

The BJP achieved such spectacular results by highlighting Narendra Modi as its standard bearer and the putative savior of India. Modi soft-pedaled the party's former Hindutva (Hindu nationalist agenda) while presenting the BJP as the party of economic reform. Modi ran against the lackluster economic performance of the UPA government, and India's pervasive economic problems, including a high inflation rate.

Modi painted himself as the ultimate free market capitalist bent on freeing India from red tape, regulation, big government, and powerful labor unions, and open its economy to free trade, foreign investment and trade. In power for only six months, the BJP has not put much of its economic reform program in place. While the party takes credit for the falling inflation rate, objective economists confirm that this is due primarily to a worldwide fall in commodity prices rather than specific BJP policies.

Although the promised economic revival has yet to materialize, Narendra Modi has met with world leaders to encourage foreign investment in India and improved trade ties. As part of this agenda, Modi has courted the United States of America. In the United States to address the UN General Assembly from September 26-30, Modi addressed a gathering of expatriate Indians and Indian-Americans in Madison Square Garden on September 28, and met with President Obama on September 29.

Modi's economic reform agenda resonates well with the American leadership, which has long wanted to see India cut red tape, further liberalize its economy, open its markets to American products and open the country to American investment. The American power elite find Narendra Modi and his economic liberalization rhetoric very attractive. Modi...