India needs multi-partisan approach for next level of development, says Manish Tewari

Former Union Minister and Chandigarh MP Manish Tewari said taking India to the next level of development would require a multi-partisan approach, without which development would remain not just a challenge but a mirage.

He was addressing a gathering at the Indian School of Business (ISB) Leadership Summit 2026 in Mohali.

Mr. Tewari said time had come to put our money where our mouth was and that this required multi-partisanship. “Without it, in these polarised times, the grand project of taking India to the next level of development will remain not only a challenge but a mirage.”

“India needs a movement akin to 1991, when the then Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, who later became Prime Minister, forged a multi-party consensus on the country’s economic trajectory,” he said.

Economic betterment

He added, “A consensus which has held the field between 1991 and 2026 across different administrations. And that is what helped unlock the creative spirits, or the animal spirits, of the Indian economy and allowed it to grow. And as a consequence, the benefits went to a very large number of people who we were able to lift to economic betterment.”

Mr. Tewari, who was the keynote speaker, reflected on the larger questions of statecraft, global power and India’s place in an increasingly complex and changing international landscape. “Between 2019 and 2026, the world has changed spectacularly. And that is the reason that impelled me to write my latest book, which is called The World Adrift. As students of business, you cannot divorce yourself from the larger geopolitical construct which essentially characterises not only our daily work life but, more importantly, our very existence as a civilisation.”

The MP said, “Unfortunately, in the fourth industrial revolution technologies, we have not been able to really find our feet. And the reason is not that we don’t have talent, not because we don’t have the capacity to build capacity, but because we are not putting capital behind it.”