The Bombay Stock Exchange just hit the huge psychological mark of 50,000. Woo hoo!
But fortunes swing wildly on the stock market. Most serious people know that. They know not to get too exuberant when the market is rising. They know how to take it on the chin when there is a crash. On the market, patience and grit usually pay off.
There are mature investors and analysts on one side. And then there are the crazies in the anti-Modi ecosystem. Always rushing to judgement, forever itching to blame anything and everything on Modi. Here is the Indian National Congress, speaking on March 9 last year.
In March 2020, the world was facing a truly unprecedented, possibly once in a century situation. Half the world under lockdown already and the rest scrambling to shut everything down. Literally thousands of people dying in America and Europe each day. The world’s richest countries on their knees. What would happen once the pandemic begins to spread across the developing world? What kind of nightmare could India be facing? Nobody knew. No wonder markets in India and around the world were crumbling.
But the Congress party has a bot like response to anything going wrong. Blame Modi.
So what happens now? Will Randeep Surjewala put up another tweet thanking PM Modi for shepherding the stock market out of this panic? Or will it suddenly be all about global factors?
In other words, take your pick and stick to it. If Modi is to blame for market crashes, then he gets all the credit when there is a bull run. It is the only intellectually honest position.
It wasn’t just 2020. Even in 2015, the Congress connected a fall in markets to PM Modi.
So when is Congress going to thank PM Modi for bringing Achche Din?
But it wasn’t just Congress. A number of elites had been taking potshots at the Prime Minister whenever markets went south.
Ah! So now that the stock market has decisively changed direction, can we expect to see an article in Scroll thanking PM Modi’s ‘structural reforms’ and praising their impact? Or will it be back to the usual refrain of how the real economy and the stock market are different?
But that was just Scroll.in. I pity them. Here is Bloomberg, which should really have known better.
Don’t draw profound conclusions from stock market swings. Old lesson. But completely forgotten because of the itch to go after PM Modi. Will Bloomberg take back its sweeping conclusions now? I doubt it.
Then, there was the outright absurd stuff like this.
How about a headline like this: PM Modi’s tweet congratulating President Biden lifts Sensex to 50,000?
That would be an absurd thing to say. But I’m not the one who started this game.
Like the stock market, Modi’s critics also go through cycles. When the going is bad, everything is Modi’s fault. When things are looking good, it is global factors, black magic and almost anything else. If they had any sense, they would realize that Congress party stock is in free fall, with an incompetent CEO and a board of directors that is perpetually out of touch. The only thing that still works over there is the ecosystem of tale bearers rushing back and forth.
