The shameless celebration on Wednesday (June 10) projecting Narendra Modi as the ‘longest serving elected uninterrupted prime minister’ raised chuckles among those who know the truth. Prime Minister Modi — and the servile leaders in his party and the larger National Democratic Alliance (NDA) conglomeration — tried to project that he has crossed the milestone set by India’s iconic first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in terms of longevity in the high office. By discounting the almost five years that Nehru was the prime minister of independent India before the first general election was held in 1952 on the basis of the newly adopted constitution of India, the leaders of the entire NDA block have shown that they are not in a position to differentiate between reality and illusion.Let us remember that members of the Constituent Assembly of India, no less, had elected Nehru as the prime minister; after all, the Constituent assembly — with its members elected by the members of the popularly elected Provincial Legislative Assemblies — was as much a representative body as there could be in the given circumstances. If Modi and company reject the Constituent Assembly’s mandate as not representative enough, then that amounts to their questioning the legitimacy of the constitution itself, as this sacred document of independent India was framed and adopted by the same Constituent Assembly.Clearly, the spectacle that the NDA presented on Wednesday was cringe stuff. Nehru was an intellectual and political colossus. Modi, with all his bluff and bluster, is a bonsai plant which can never reach the stature of a banyan tree. Forget the optics. Think of the substance. Just compare Nehru’s tenure with that of Modi: you can see who was the real saviour of Mother India and who is a mere pretender. Nehru became the prime minister when the country had barely 17% literacy and the average life expectancy at birth of an Indian was below 30 years. Nehru had inherited an economy that was in a moribund state for two centuries.Also read: Camera over Country: The BJP Model of GovernanceFor the record, the growth rate of the Indian economy was an average of 0.1% between 1900 and 1947. Nehru had the unenviable task of building an economy from such ruins of an extractive colonial empire. He went about the task with single-minded dedication. The fact that India under Nehru managed an average annual growth rate of 3.5% was not a mean achievement (though Raj Krishna pejoratively called it as ‘Hindu rate of growth’ and Modi ridiculed it as ‘Congress rate of growth’).Stuart Corbridge, John Harriss and Craig Jeffrey, in their seminal work India Today: Economy, Politics and Society, had studied the economic growth of the post-colonial countries and had found that the average annual economic growth of the best performers was around 3%. India’s 3.5% growth story was indeed remarkable, given that India was the most populous among those countries and, more importantly, India, under Nehru, had sustained a fully representative democracy based on universal adult franchise which no other post-colonial country could boast about during that period.Contrast it with Prime Minister Modi’s track record. During the 2013-14 financial year, months before Modi took over the reins of power in Delhi, India’s growth rate was an impressive 6.9%. This cannot be dismissed as Congress’s false claim. This was as per the revised GDP series released by the Modi government. In fact, as it has been authoritatively established, under Manmohan Singh’s leadership from 2004 to 2014, the GDP growth rate averaged a robust 8.1%. In contrast, the Modi government, from 2014 to 2023, presided over a relatively dismal growth rate of 5.6%, as all the available data show.When Modi was trashing the Congress growth rate in his celebratory address to the NDA constituents, he was certainly not ignorant of facts; as is his wont, he was spinning lies, which are being perpetrated by pliant economists enjoying the meagre rewards thrown at them by the saffron establishment.Also read: Modi’s 4,399 Days in Office: Less a Record, More About Conditions Apply*In fact, the real economic achievement (or lack of it) of the Modi establishment has been convincingly articulated by the well-known economist Surjit Bhalla. He exposes the false claim of the Modi acolytes that India is the fastest growing major economy of the world. He wrote in The Indian Express: “For the period of BJP rule from 2014 onwards, India’s rank in terms of GDP growth is ninth, in terms of per capita GDP growth, the rank is eighth, and it’s placed 16th in terms of per capita growth in US dollars. Bangladesh is the first in terms of US dollar growth, with an average per capita growth of 8.3 per cent per annum. Ethiopia is 2nd at 7.2 per cent. India is 16th at just 4.7 per cent. No matter how one slices the data, it’s time to dispense with the moniker of the fastest-growing major economy.”In fact, Bhalla adds insult to injury when he says: “India has also moved from being one of the “Fragile Five” economies in 2013 to possibly becoming one of just two (along with Turkey) today.”This is the true face of Modi’s India. Even after 12 years in power, in Prime Minister Modi’s zeitgeist, India is always a land of the future and never of the present. He is now selling the snake oil of ‘Viksit Bharat by August 2047’. That’s decades away; he won’t be around when that date arrives; for the present, he is seeking to entertain the domestic audience with the self-congratulatory headline-managing fantasy: that Modi has crossed the milestone set by Nehru. What a pity that our prime minister believes that when all else fails, immortality can be achieved through spectacular lies.N.R. Mohanty is a senior journalist.