Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal. A newsletter on Indian politics.As always, if you’ve been sent this newsletter and like it, to get it in your inbox every week, sign up here (click on “follow”).Las week, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced in Parliament that India’s gross domestic product would hit the $5 trillion mark in 2029.It’s a banal projection predicated on the simple maths of compounding. The Indian economy, valued at nearly $4 trillion, is growing so it will inevitably touch that mark one day. Yet, most Indians will be hit by an uncomfortable sense of deja vu when they read the phrase “$5 trillion economy”. It has functioned as a leitmotif of the Modi era, meant mostly to gaslight Indians about the true state of the economy.Like a parent trying to stave off a child’s tantrum by promising something desirable in the future, the Modi government has repeatedly flashed the prospect of a “$5 trillion economy” to Indians with little explanation on how it would to be achieved – and no explanation when it wasn’t.Tall claimsAt the start of 2018, Modi kicked it off by promising at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that India would be a $5-trillion economy by 2025. Later that year, the government said that it had constituted a working group to prepare a “roadmap towards achieving a 5 trillion dollar economy by 2025”.In 2019, Modi moved the deadline forward. At a BRICS summit in Brazil, he said India would be a $5 trillion economy by 2024. What changed in his government’s modelling was never explained.The financial year 2020-’21 was the worst in independent India’s history. The economy shrank by more than 7% thanks to the Union government’s messy, draconian Covid lockdown. No other major economy has suffered during Covid like India’s economy did.Yet, bizarrely, this made no difference to the government’s $5T promises. In 2022, the government’s second-most powerful person, Home Minister Amit Shah, said India would become a $5 trillion economy by 2025. A couple of months later, Foreign Minister S Jaishankar repeated it in Cyprus.What happened when the deadline of 2025 was actually reached with no $5 trillion in sight? The government simply ignored it.I think it is almost certain that India's GDP in calendar year 2025 will be around USD 5 trillion. We will find out. pic.twitter.com/HUOQBx4dS7— Harsh Gupta Madhusudan (@harshmadhusudan) December 14, 2023