BackDon’t the weather gods like the NDA?
Will the NDA govt break its unlucky streak with the IMD monsoon forecast on Wednesday?
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In something likely to be characterized by its own supporters as bad karma, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is having an unbelievably bad run with the weather.
Within weeks of assuming power on 16 May, following a landslide win in the 16th general elections, news of a below-par monsoon started trickling in.
By mid-July, it was clear that most parts of India would be hit by drought. The fledgling NDA government was left scrambling to mitigate the damage from the drought, even as it was attempting to stabilize a vulnerable economy. This was the unfortunate backdrop against which it presented its interim budget in July.
Barely had the monsoon season eased that a devastating cyclone, Hudhud, hit the south-eastern coast of India in October. Vizag, the port city of Andhra Pradesh, was all but flattened and, in the process, became India’s first city to be directly hit by a cyclone.
And now, the government is dealing with the fallout of unseasonal winter rains across swathes of India. The rains, measured as excess in 421 out of the 641 districts of the country, have damaged crops in 14 states and come at time when the NDA is piloting controversial amendments to the land acquisition bill, dubbed by the political opposition as anti-farmer.
Back during its first term in power, the NDA was voted out of power at least partly because of a poor monsoon in 2002 and a scratchy one in 2003. It compouned the problem by bringing the elections forward by six months in 2004, ahead of the monsoon, which ended up being normal.
Which then begs the question: Will the NDA government break its unlucky streak with the IMD forecast on Wednesday?
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