Only Modi himself can unsettle him; maybe Priyanka can stand up to him: Ruchir Sharma

NEW DELHI: Ruchir Sharma, Chief Global Strategist and head of the Emerging Markets Equity team at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, says nobody can unsettle Prime Minister Narendra Modi even in the next general election, except himself (mistakes if any).

It’s Modi vs Modi now, he said.

“We are back to really an era where this is going to be Modi versus Modi. You can imagine a scenario where Modi by any chance loses, let us say five years from now, it will be entirely due to him because I do not see who is going to be the challenger who comes up in such a strong way in the next few years unless some magical thing happens and Priyanka or someone are able to build that aura to take him on,” Sharma said.


Sharma, who has been covering Indian elections for 25 years now, said the Opposition UPA in no way could have acted differently in its election campaign.

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“If you were to have a new campaign now, it must be about an alternative personality, who stands up to Modi. There is no way Rahul Gandhi is the man for that. So the question is whom. Unfortunately, we just cannot see the right person,” he said.

Sharma, who had earlier predicted that the NDA would fall short of a majority by a few seats, said he was surprised that it ended up being ‘a wave election’, even as 99 per cent of the people who were covering the event on the ground failed to detect the 'wave'.

Probably, 6-7 per cent votes from young first-time voters swung in BJP’s favour, Sharma said in an exclusive interview with ETNow.

BJP on its own grabbed a simple majority 303 seats in the just-concluded general elections, bettering its 2014 tally 282. The main Opposition, Congress, improved its tally to 52 from 44, but could in no way create any obstacle to BJP’s second term.

Rahul Gandhi, Congress President, last week offered to relinquish office as party chief after the debacle, but the party’s top decision making body rejected the same.

Sharma said when he first met Priyanka Gandhi back in 2004, she appeared to have a lot of the right traits. “She was connecting very well with the people, much more eloquent, fluent in Hindi, more comfortable on the stage. But when we saw her campaigning in Rae Bareli recently, she did not seem to have that sort of novelty value. It just seemed as if India had moved on a bit where just charisma could do something,” he said

Sharma said it is very hard to see who else apart from her could lead the Opposition.

Sharma said earnings growth in India Inc has bottomed out and at least for this year all expectations are that earnings growth will be the highest in India among all emerging markets “although we tend to start every year saying the same thing,” he said.