Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju on Wednesday, June 10, 2026, credited 12 years of NDA governance with liberating India from what he called the Congress party's deliberate use of the term 'Hindu rate of growth' — a phrase he argued was coined to deflect blame for slow economic performance onto the country's Hindu majority rather than on Congress policy failures.

Context

Posting in Hindi on X, Rijiju wrote: 'NDA ke 12 varshon ki ek badi safalta ye bhi hai ki desh Congress ke kuchakra se azad hua hai' ('One of the great achievements of NDA's 12 years is that the country has been freed from Congress's vicious cycle'). He directed the message at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, tagging him and using the hashtag #LongestServingElectedPMModi.

The minister argued that Congress had given a name — 'Hindu rate of growth' — to India's sluggish economic expansion, but that the stigma was pinned on the country's large Hindu population rather than on the party's own governance failures. 'The working style, the responsibility, and the failure were Congress's,' Rijiju wrote, 'but the blot was put in the name of the country's large Hindu population.'

Policy Backdrop

The phrase 'Hindu rate of growth' was coined by economist Raj Krishna in the 1970s to describe India's approximate 3.5 per cent annual GDP growth under the Licence Raj system — a period characterised by heavy state regulation, import substitution, and centralised planning that persisted largely until the 1991 liberalisation.

Rijiju's framing reinterprets the term not as an empirical economic observation but as a political instrument used to associate economic stagnation with Hindu identity rather than with Congress-era policy design. The BJP has repeatedly invoked pre-1991 growth records in campaign messaging since 2014, contrasting the Licence Raj era with the infrastructure push and reform agenda it attributes to the National Democratic Alliance.

Stakeholders and Impact

The post carries symbolic weight for BJP's Hindu voter base, framing a decades-old academic term as a historical injustice that the Modi government has now corrected. For the Indian National Congress, which governed India for most of the period between 1947 and 2014, the charge adds to a sustained BJP narrative of institutional and economic mismanagement.

Economists and opposition voices have historically maintained that the 'Hindu rate of growth' was a neutral descriptive label — not a communal attribution — reflecting structural constraints of the era. The Congress party has not yet publicly responded to Rijiju's specific framing in this post.

What's Next

The post is part of a broader BJP communications campaign marking milestones of Modi's tenure as what the party describes as the longest-serving elected Prime Minister of India. As the next Economic Survey and quarterly GDP data releases approach, historical growth comparisons are likely to remain a flashpoint in parliamentary debates and election-season rhetoric. Any formal government presentation of long-run growth data in the winter session of Parliament could give Rijiju's argument fresh legislative traction.