This is John Batchel, a conversation with my longtime good colleague, Sadan Dume, of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

He writes East-Dist, about India.

Mr. Modi is a disappointment these days after an exciting two early terms, now the third term, is cautious.

How?

Sartan gives an example here of the labor laws

and the control of an enterprise,

no matter what the owner wants to do or grow,

control of it by the employees, complete control.

Sadanan explains it's left over from once upon a time the Communist Party.

Here's Sadanan.

What needs to be done is obvious.

Doing it.

Don't have an answer for that.

Here's Sartanan.

Yeah, well, it used to be.

So, no, Modi has raised that from 100 to 300, which is better.

But it, you know, it used to be just 100.

You know, all of this stuff dates back to India's socialist era. And so India became one of the only countries, if not the only country,

in the non-communist bloc, where a business basically needed

permission from workers if it wanted to shut down or if it wanted to fire people.

And obviously this made it completely unviable.

And the best example here, John, is that, you know, when India became independent in 1947,

...