Tewari calls for multi-partisan push to take India to next stage of development

Former Union Minister and Chandigarh MP Manish Tewari has said that lifting India to its next stage of development will require cooperation across party lines, arguing that in today's polarised climate the goal would otherwise remain out of reach.

Speaking as the keynote speaker at the Indian School of Business (ISB) Leadership Summit 2026 in Mohali, he said the time had come to match words with action, and that doing so demanded multi-partisanship. Without it, he warned, the project of advancing India's development would remain not merely a challenge but a mirage.

Mr. Tewari held up the economic reforms of 1991 as a template, recalling how then Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, who later became Prime Minister, built a multi-party consensus around the country's economic direction. That consensus, he noted, endured across successive administrations from 1991 to 2026, unlocking the energies of the Indian economy and enabling growth whose benefits reached a large number of people and improved their economic condition.

Addressing broader questions of statecraft, global power and India's position in a shifting international order, the MP said the world had changed dramatically between 2019 and 2026 — a transformation, he said, that prompted him to write his latest book, The World Adrift. He told the gathering of business students that they could not separate themselves from the wider geopolitical context that shapes not only daily working life but the very existence of a civilisation.

Mr. Tewari also said India had not yet found its footing in fourth industrial revolution technologies. The shortfall, he argued, does not stem from a lack of talent or an inability to build capacity, but from a failure to put capital behind these fields.