Changing names is easy, why do anything difficult.

There is no comparison between Donald Trump and Narendra Modi, wrote S Roy. Trump sets the agenda for the national debate while Modi "is always saying the right thing, if anything at all". Except for demonetization of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes Modi has taken ownership of all Congress schemes by renaming them, prompting Shashi Tharoor to write, "Instead of being a game-changing government, the BJP has turned out to be a name-changing one." While Trump wants to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico, to keep illegal immigrants from crossing into the US, Modi has wasted Rs 30 billion in building the tallest statue in the world in his home state of Gujarat. Land was appropriated from local villagers and tribals, for which, they have not been fully compensated they say. Modi has played the Hindutva angle by promoting a ban on eating beef, which has led to several men being lynched. However, he has done nothing to stop the loot of wealth from Hindu temples by central and state governments, which has been going on since independence. Exactly two years ago on 8 November while Trump was winning the presidential election against all odds, Modi was on television unleashing several months of hell, called demonetization. We had to queue up for hours outside banks to exchange our old notes for new, often returning exhausted and empty handed. Did it work? It has been an unmitigated disaster. Modi had calculated that notes worth around Rs 3 trillion will not be returned which would be paid to the government by the Reserve Bank in the form of a dividend. In fact, 99.3% of notes in circulation have been returned to the RBI. Modi hoped that India would become a cashless society which, along with forcible fingerprinting of the entire population, called Aadhaar, would enable total surveillance of every Indian citizen. Cash in circulation is almost back to levels before demonetization and rising fast. Replacing old notes with new ones, supposedly with enhanced security, was meant to deal a severe blow to counterfeiters but that seems to have failed as well. We are being told that demonetization was a humongous success because the number of people filing tax returns has doubled. Tax returns may have increased but tax collection has increased only very slightly, the major chunk must be government employees whose salaries jumped from the Seventh Pay Commission. While Trump has launched a trade war with China, pulled out of the nuclear treaty with Iran and sent the army to the border with Mexico to stop a caravan of migrants from central America, Modi has continued with the failed policy of handouts financed by Rs 10 trillion from extra taxes on fuel. Now that oil prices are up and the rupee is down he is stuck. Modi may have the ego to think that he can run India but he does not have knowledge for new ideas or the courage to really make a change. Even though he is an expert at changing names he should not change his to Trump. No comparison.