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The Wall Street veteran hasn’t been afraid to voice his support for Modi. In April, Dimon effusively praised the Indian leader during an event at The Economic Club of New York.
“Modi has done an unbelievable job in India. I know the liberal press here, they beat the hell out of him,” Dimon said. “He’s taken 400 million people out of poverty.”
Dimon also said he thought US officials needed to stop “lecturing” Modi on how to run India and instead start taking lessons from the world’s most populous democracy.
“They’ve got an unbelievable education system. Unbelievable infrastructure. They’re lifting up that whole country because this one man is tough,” Dimon said.
“He’s breaking down some of the bureaucracy,” he added. “And we need a little bit more of that here.”
Representatives for Dimon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
Modi, who’s held the premiership since 2014, has long been a favorite of corporate titans like Dimon. Modi’s pro-growth, pro-business policies are a huge draw for tech giants like Apple and Tesla, both of which have signaled intentions to expand operations there.
“India is an incredibly exciting market. It’s a major focus for us,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a November earnings call. “I was just there and the dynamism in the market, the vibrancy is unbelievable.”
Modi’s decade-long reign as India’s prime minister has coincided with a decline in the country’s poverty levels. According to the World Bank, the share of India’s population living in extreme poverty has dropped from 18.8% in 2014 to 12.9% in 2021.
However, some of Modi’s critics may argue that his track record in economic policymaking has been uneven.
In October, India’s unemployment rate hit 10.1%, per the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. That is the first time the country’s jobless rate has exceeded 10% since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Growth has been good, but it has to be set in perspective,” Raghuram Rajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, told the Financial Times in January.
News of Modi’s shrinking majority hit the Indian stock market on Tuesday — it registered its most significant daily drop since March 2020.
To be sure, Modi is likely to stay on as prime minister, albeit as the head of a coalition government. Experts say the electoral surprise is unlikely to unravel Modi’s past reforms.
“This surprise creates political and policy uncertainties that will have at least short-term consequences,” said Jeff Lande, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center.
“A reversal of the sort of investments and capital expenditure that the government has advanced in recent years, in favor of a return to subsidies, protectionism, and welfare programs, is unlikely,” he continued.
