India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi.ADNAN ABIDI/Reuters
During India's boisterous, five-week election campaign – amid the autorickshaw rallies, the name-calling and the meaningless faux-scandals – Narendra Modi was able to coast well above tough questions about how he would govern India, batting away fear-mongering insults and leaning back on his reputation as a capable administrator.
After all, Mr. Modi – who barely granted interviews, anyway – was running for prime minister with a stellar track record: 12 years as chief minister of the state of Gujarat, which had economic growth well above India's national average. And his opponents were running – limping, might be more apt – on a tattered track record of corruption, scandal, dithering and economic mismanagement.
But now, it is budget time. On Thursday, Mr. Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley must deliver the goods. And after achieving the strongest electoral mandate in 30 years, the crowd wants fireworks.
There can be no more question-dodging now about which sprawling, inefficient subsidy programs for the poor will be cut, and which will not. No room for clouded, non-assertions about foreign investment or vague, detail-thin reassurances about growing the economy.
Will the businesspeople and investors who cheered Mr. Modi and his right-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party to victory have the streamlined, bound-to-be-successful "Modinomics" they hoped for? The type of business-friendly policies that wooed investors like Bombardier, Ford and McCain to set up plants in his state.
Or will they get some watered-down, politically weak budget weighed down by all the concerns that made the Congress government, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, seem so weak and incapable. At least, with its majority, the BJP doesn't have to dabble in political horse-trading.
So far, there is hope that Mr. Modi's budget will be bold and tackle some tough, politically risky areas. Reports suggest that Mr. Modi's administration will take advantage of the Indian stock market's 7 per cent rally – since Mr. Modi's euphoric win – to sell off minority stakes in state-owned companies. That could buy time for India's new government with a cash injection of $11.7-billion (U.S.).
Mr. Jaitley has already warned that their budget will not indulge in "mindless populism" that would endanger the state's finances.
The government has already tossed out some bitter pills by hiking railway fares and gas prices, and there are hints that there will be a new General Sales Tax (GST).
There is also some expectation that he will cut back on the sprawling subsidy schemes that cost the Indian exchequer about $43-billion per year, and which expanded over the decade in which the Nehruvian, social democratic Congress Party was in power. India's central bank governor, Raghuram Rajan, has asked the government to cut back on its subsidies so he can concentrate on slaying the inflation of staples such as onions that have hit ordinary Indians hard.
All of these measures would bolster state finances, in a country that has one third of the world's poorest people. It could be the beginning of India's great economic revival. But if Mr. Modi is to keep the economically euphoric aura about him – an aura that can help India, beyond his actual policies – he will have to deliver a budget that sparkles.