This time last year, Narendra Modi seized the attention of his audience with a rhetorical tour de force in his first independence day speech, promising toilets and bank accounts for all and urging manufacturers to “make in India” rather than China. Twelve months on, the country’s mood has changed, and so has Mr Modi’s.

India’s prime minister no longer enjoys the uncritical support of the investors who welcomed his landslide election triumph 15 months ago. The annual address, delivered on Saturday from the walls of Delhi’s Red Fort, was partly a defensive assessment of his record so far.

“We had an emperor on the 27th of May 2014,” the industrialist Rahul Bajaj said in a weekend television interview, referring to the date after Mr Modi’s lavish inauguration. “I am not anti this government. But the fact does remain, the shine seems to be wearing off.”

One reason for the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government’s failure to push through the reforms it promised is that Sonia Gandhi’s opposition Congress party has obstructed legislation with noisy demonstrations in parliament. In the just-ended monsoon parliamentary session lasting three weeks, not a single law was passed.

Congress was crushed by Mr Modi in the general election and left with only 44 of the 542 seats in the lower house of parliament. But the opposition has blocked the passing of laws in the upper house, largely to spite Mr Modi.

Ignoring the protests of business leaders, Ms Gandhi and her son Rahul have even stalled the introduction of a nationwide goods and services tax (GST) despite the fact that the levy — aimed at creating a single market out of India’s 29 states, reducing bureaucracy and boosting economic output — was previously championed by Congress

Among other setbacks, Mr Modi has also been forced to abandon a proposed land reform that would have made it easier to acquire land from farmers for roads, factories and housing.

Mr Modi, who describes himself in private as a doer rather than a talker, says he has overseen the opening of more than 150m bank accounts for the previously unbanked and the building of more than 400,000 toilets in government schools. Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics maker, gave a fillip to Mr Modi’s “Make in India” campaign this month when it announced plans to invest $5bn in a factory in Maharashtra state.

Even without legislation, Mr Modi’s supporters say, the government can accelerate the building of roads and railways and start to tackle the bad loan problems of the state-owned banks that dominate the financial system. “There are so many things to be done,” says one senior official in New Delhi. “Everything is not lost if GST is not passed.”

Investors are not convinced. They think Mr Modi missed his early chance to rid India of a retrospective tax law that has sapped investor confidence. He has also failed, they say, to make progress in creating jobs or eliminating bureaucracy and ineptitude of the sort that forced Nestlé to withdraw 29,000 tonnes of Maggi instant noodles from the market over a health ban found by a court last week to be “unjustified”.

Gurcharan Das, a commentator and former head of consumer goods group Procter & Gamble in India, says the country remains a “hostile place to do business”. Mr Modi, he believes, was elected to control inflation, stop corruption and create jobs. He has done the first two, but “needs to talk more about the third”.

When the ambitious Mr Modi won the biggest election victory in a generation he said he needed 10 years — two terms — to achieve his aims. Now he is talking about three. But the visible loss of momentum of the government’s reform project suggests that even a second term is not guaranteed.

After a humiliating defeat in the Delhi state election in February, Mr Modi and the BJP are making every effort to win the giant northern state of Bihar in the autumn (if Bihar were a nation its 103m inhabitants would make it the 12th most populous in the world).

If they win, they may regain confidence and accelerate reform. If they lose, there is a risk that Mr Modi will abandon the grand design of development he articulated a year ago and revert to the sorry spectacle of Indian politics as usual.