Two globally accepted
power-lists, published by Time and Fortune, two highly influential magazines, both
from the stable of same media house - 'Time
100: The 100 Most Influential People' and 'Fortune's World's Greatest Leaders'
- have one thing in common this year - and it will lead to many headlines and
analyses, not only in India - but even in the international media.
Narendra Modi is absent from both
of them - while he featured on both of them last year.
What does it tell?
We are bound to see debates and
discourses on this prospect.
'Time 100 Most Influential People
2016' that came out today is the 2nd list of the year after Fortune's List of '50
World's Greatest Leaders' which came out last month and featured Arvind
Kejriwal, and since then Arvind Kejriwal and Aam Aadmi Party are busy taking
credit for a successful first year in governance, including the much
controversial 'Odd-Even' scheme of traffic rotation.
In 2015, Narendra Modi was
featured in 'Time 100 Most Influential People 2015' list under 'Time 100 Leaders'
category and Barack Obama had written a piece on him titled 'India's
Reformer-In-Chief'.
This year, in 2016, though there
are six Indians in the list, including Raghuram Rajan, a globally renowned
economist and RBI chief, who is certainly not on the best terms with the NDA
government, there is no Narendra Modi. Other Indians include Google CEO Sundar
Pichai, Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, actress Priyanka
Chopra and tennis player Sania Mirza.
His absence becomes more
noticeable because the important names from the last year's list, i.e., Barack
Obama, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Hillary Clinton, and Angela Merkel, are
there in this year's list as well.
Fortune's 'World's 50 Greatest
Leaders' list came out last month. It was topped by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff
Bezos. Amazon's is the pioneer and the world's biggest retailer of the
e-commerce segment and is poised to the take top spot in India. Delhi's chief
minister and Narendra Modi's arch-rival Arvind Kejriwal is the only Indian to
feature in the list (ranked at 42).
That is not a big deal but it
becomes important when we see that Narendra Modi was featured at quite high on
this list in 2015 - at 6th spot. Okay, even Barack Obama is not there. But
then, he was not there even last year. So, it many depend on the criteria for short-listing
used by the magazine. But again, there are many from the last year's list who
feature in the list this year as well.
Narendra Modi's political
adversaries would certainly exploit this as a fodder to munch, a trend of prime
minister's waning popularity. And it couldn't have come at a worst time than
this - today, when the Uttarakhand High Court dealt a body blow to the BJP led
Union Government by setting aside the President's Rule in Uttarakhand - using
some tough and acidic remarks for the Union Government for sabotaging
democratic norms - a historic decision that every democratic soul would love to
see ratified by the Supreme Court when the Centre approaches there.
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/
