India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the fifth biggest geopolitical risk of 2020 according to the world’s leading political risk consultancy, Eurasia Group.

The annual ‘Top 10 Risks’ forecast of for 2020 was published on January 6 2020. The report is considered to be a top tier geopolitical indicator among global investors, multinational firms and various financial and business consultancies.

The authors of the report: Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan in their analysis of India as titled “India gets Modi-fied” say, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spent much of his second term promoting controversial social policies at the expense of an economic agenda. The impacts will be felt in 2020, with intensified communal and sectarian instability, as well as foreign policy and economic setbacks.”

It also holds the Modi-Shah duo responsible for the sectarian and religious conflicts that are growing in the country. The report noted the government’s actions in Jammu and Kashmir and says, “They revoked the special status for Jammu and Kashmir and implemented a system to identify illegal immigrants in the northeast, stripping 1.9 million people of citizenship.”

The report also underlines the fact that the Indian government passed a law for the first time, which makes religion a criterion for migrants from neighbouring countries to formally acquire Indian citizenship.

The report points out the underperformance of the GST and the uncertainty on the fiscal deficit. “The country’s fiscal situation is precarious, as the government faces a “widening fiscal deficit” marked by the underperformance of the goods and services tax,” the author says.

“A weakened economy will, in turn, feed further economic nationalism and protectionism, weighing on India’s troubled course in 2020”, it reveals.

Bremmer who had earlier argued that Modi is “India’s best hope” for economic reform has now said that things have changed. The other top risks that are outlined in the report are US domestic policies under Trump, decoupling of China and the US in the technological field, divergences between the US and China’s political; structure, and the like.

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