During his first campaign for national office in 2014, Narendra Modi made a memorable pledge. If elected as prime minister, he would launch a crusade to repatriate untaxed wealth stashed abroad by unscrupulous businesspeople. The recovered bounty, Modi promised, would be worth as much as $25,000 for every Indian, a colossal sum.
About a year after Modi won, with no sign of the windfall, a local broadcaster asked the Indian leader’s election mastermind and closest political ally, Amit Shah, what had happened. “Look, this is a jumla,” said Shah, now India’s interior minister. The obscure word—found in Hindi, Urdu, and Gujarati, the official language of Gujarat state, Modi and Shah’s home turf—literally means sentence or clause. But as Modi’s star has grown brighter, a different connotation has gained prominence: a false promise or gross exaggeration.
