Could India’s new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and his finance minister, Arun Jaitley, unleash the sort of economic changes that PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, their respective predecessors, set in motion back in 1991 – changes that helped drive the Indian economy out of decades of stagnation and rescue millions from poverty?
Mr Jaitley was always going to struggle to match the expectations that had been placed upon him. Partly that was the fault of Mr Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, who had sought to suggest during the recent election campaign that they had a ready fix to all the nation’s many challenges.