Modi Myth - Frontline

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COVER STORY

Published: May 1, 2013 12:30 IST | Updated: May 1, 2013 13:24 ISTCOVER STORY

Modi myth

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s ef forts, with enthusiastic support from his public relationsmanagers, to project himself as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate trigger unrest in his party andin the National Democratic Alliance it leads and bring his record under scrutiny. By VENKITESHR AMAKRISHNAN

“A month ago, Modi vs Rahul, a week ago Modi vs Nitish, today Modi vs Advani, tomorrow Modi vs Obama, a month hence Modi vsGandalf.” @Scary southpaw’s tweet was firmly tongue in cheek while drawing up a list of existing and potential adversaries of GujaratChief Minister Narendra Modi in the context of his sustained efforts to acquire greater visibility and political centre stage.

Evidently, the eff ort is to spoof the vast, animated group of Modi f ans in social media networks, who project him as the one-pointsolution to all social and political maladies of India. The point of the Modi f ans is taken to quixotic extremes in the tweet with thesuggestion that Modi can even match the magical powers of Gandalf, the “wizard” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels The H obbit and The Lord o f the Rings.

While there is indeed an element of caricatured exaggeration in this, there is also little doubt that it provides a broad idea of the tusslesthat Modi’s recent initiatives have unleashed within his own party, the larger National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that the BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP) heads, and in the national political firmament as a whole. At another level, it also points broadly towards thecontours of the Modi campaign, which is being advanced in a hyperbolic narrative, where the leader’s personality is stamped withseemingly supernatural attributes of leadership, administrative skills and v ision. Indeed, the 1 40-character Twitter format cannotcapture the details of the Modi narrative with even a modicum of comprehensiveness, but the Chief Minister’s recent f orays intodifferent regions of the country and into fora as diverse as the chambers of commerce and the Sivagiri Sree Narayana Guru Mutt havecertainly lived up to the suggestions in the tweet .

These forays have marked a high point of the massive public relations (PR) ex ercise, eagerly backed by large sections of the big

business and several media enterprises that have been built around Modi over the past few years. In the days to come, the PR machinery could come up with new exercises that create many more crescendo moments. For the time being, however, the thrust of these forays and the PR exercise has been to underscore three points. First, that Modi is a leader with new ideas and with a dif f erentperspective on governance. Second, that he can address the varied needs and interests of dif f erent sections of society in spite of thestigma of genocide of Muslims that took place in Gujarat under his chief ministership in 2002. Third, that these projected attributeshave been accepted by the people, making Modi “the strongest candidate” for the Prime Minister’s post in the next elections.

Undoubtedly, all these points have f ound some resonance among segments of the targeted audience across the country, particularly among the rank and file of the BJP. According to sources in the senior leadership of the BJP, a corporate house close to Modi hadcommissioned a nationwide survey, which suggested that the saff ron party could win as many as 190 seats in the next Lok Sabhaelections if Modi was pro jected as the BJP’s prime ministerial choice. “The figure, in the absence of such a pro jection, is below 160. Thisis being widely circulated within the lower echelons of the party, leading to a growing clamour to officially pro ject Modi as the primeministerial candidate. The projection has undoubtedly enthused the BJP cadre in the northern States of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan andHaryana, where a combination of Hindutva and development is being perceived as winner for the party,” a senior BJP leader fromUttar Pradesh said. Many other leaders and activists of the party added that the Modi campaign had resonances outside the party , too,particularly among a sizable segment of the middle classes.

But along with this, the divisive nature of pro jecting Modi has come to the f ore forcefully at dif f erent levels of the polity and society .Some of the most conspicuous manifestations of the divisiveness have been within the BJP-led NDA and within the BJP itself. Even asthe foray of Modi into different parts of the country was taking place, Bihar’s Janata Dal (United) Chief Minister Nitish Kumar assertedthat the NDA, of which his party is a constituent, should be led by a secular leader who was committed to upholding “Raj Dharma”, thecherished principles of righteous governance. While Nitish Kumar did not mention Modi by name, the reference was obviously to theadvice given by former BJP Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, after the 2002 Gujarat riots, that Modi should uphold “Raj Dharma”and “and not discriminate on the basis of caste, creed or religion”. The JD(U) National Executive, held in New Delhi on April 13 and 14,

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asked the BJP to choose its prime ministerial candidate by the end of 2013 and insisted that the person chosen f or the post should havesecular credentials.

The Shiv Sena, another long-standing ally of the BJP, also came up with comments that virtually rejected the pro jection of Modi as theNDA’s prime ministerial candidate. Making a not-so-indirect reference to the survey figures doing the rounds in the BJP, the Sena’smouthpiece Saamna stated in an editorial that “declaring someone’s candidature may result in a gain of five to 10 seats but some oldallies will leave, costing f ive to 25 seats”. It went on to warn that “the BJP has the right to name its PM candidate but it cannot do so onits own steam”. Comparing the NDA with Arjuna’s chariot, the editorial pointed out that it is drawn by many horses and that every horse is important. “Or else there will be a dif f erent Mahabharata and the chariot wheel will get stuck,” it said. Bef ore his passing inNovember 2012, Balasaheb Thackeray, the Shiv Sena f ounder, had said that Sushma Swaraj, the BJP’s Leader of the Opposition in theLok Sabha, would be his preferred candidate for the Prime Minister’s post.

Of f icially, the BJP has not taken a position on the questions raised by its allies, but it is no secret that there is considerable oppositionamong the top leadership to the possible choice of Modi. Barring Arun Jaitley, the BJP’s Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha,and former party president M. Venkaiah Naidu, there are not many takers for the projection of Modi. Veteran leader L.K. Advani andSushma Swaraj are f irmly opposed to Modi while party president Rajnath Singh is displaying statesman-like qualities by takingeverybody along. In his public pronouncements, he has been praising all leaders by turns. Sushma Swaraj, on her part, made it clearthat Advani was still one of the top candidates being considered f or the position.

RSS not f or Modi

The mood in the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of the BJP, is also divided on similar lines. RSSsarsangchalak Mohanrao Bhagwat’s disinclination towards the choice of Modi is no secret within the Sangh Parivar. However, two othersenior RSS leaders, Madan Das Devi and Suresh Soni, are considered to have a good equation with Arun Jaitley, who in turn has goodrelations with Modi. The belief in the Modi camp is that the RSS will not be able to overlook the groundswell of support in Modi’s f avouramong the BJP rank and f ile at the time of decision-making.

While all these debates, including the one involving the two allies of the BJP, have only broadly delineated the opposition to Modi without actually naming him, some senior leaders in the NDA such as Sivanand Tiwari of the JD(U) have been more direct and

f orthcoming. Tiwari told Frontline that the hyperbolic nature of the campaign to thrust Modi to the political centre stage displays the vaulting ambition behind it. “It lays no sanctity on f acts or on truth. While analysing, at a conference in Delhi, the ‘development’ that he brought to Gujarat, Modi claimed that he had undone the damage done by the Congress in the State and that work had just started inthe State. But barely half an hour before that, at the same conf erence, the Chief Minister took credit f or the Amul dairy, set uporiginally in 1946 and nurtured to its present successf ul model since the 1970s under several regimes, including that of the Congress.The leadership given to this cooperative movement by Dr Verghese Kurien is well known. Equally well known is the ignominioustreatment Modi meted out to this legendary social entrepreneur af ter becoming Chief Minister in 2002. He has no qualms about listingenterprises that had made history long before he came to power as part of his own successes,” Tiwari said. He added that this selectiveappropriation of success stories had been the hallmark of the so-called Modi development saga.

“Of course, in the process the PR machinery seems to have successf ully managed to cover up many unpleasant facts about the Modiregime—how the public health infrastructure in Gujarat is in a shambles; how the rate of decline in Gujarat’s infant mortality rate ismuch lower than the national average; how project implementation has plummeted from 73 per cent in 2003 to 1 3 per cent in 2011 ;how Gujarat is lagging behind in per capita income, gross domestic product and foreign direct investment inflows; or the pathetic stateof malnutrition and the gender ratio.” However, Tiwari added that he would gladly give credit to Modi for improving Gujarat’sinfrastructure in terms of roads and f or presenting a more decisive administrative and political posture as compared with leaders of theCongress such as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and f or winning three consecutive elections. “But that by itself cannot be translatedas an approval of his developmental model, which is weighed in favour of promoting corporate interests.”

The JD(U) is not the only party to complain about the appropriation of success stories or smart ideas by Modi. On April 8, Modi made apresentation, which was described as his “complete economic agenda”, at a conference called the Think India Dialogue. Thepresentation was titled “Why India Needs Less Government and More Governance”. One of the points highlighted by the Chief Minister’s PR machinery as well as by a number of media organisations after the conference was Modi’s P4 idea or the slogan of people-private-public-partnership. Modi outlined this idea as f ollows: “Good governance is defined by public-private partnership. If we want to implement good governance, we must look to P4—people-private-public partnership. People should be kept in the loop by thegovernment.” The Modi PR machinery and the media went to town pro jecting it as an original perception. The presentation did notcredit anyone with the idea.

Interestingly, the idea had been expressed and delineated by other persons in many fora long before Modi addressed the Think IndiaDialogue. Akhilesh Yadav, the Samajwadi Party (S.P.) Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, was quoted in Frontli ne (October 5, 2012) assaying: “Akhilesh Yadav, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and S.P. leader, said that his party was trying to address issues of liberalisation not merely by looking at it as an enterprise involving the private sector and the government but by bringing in theinterests of the people at every stage.”

More specifically, in an article published in the New Delhi-based I nclusion magazine in its April-June 2011 issue, A.R. Raju, former Additional Secretary to the Government of Kerala and currently Additional Private Secretary to Minister of State for HomeMullappally Ramachandran, had dealt with the concept in greater detail. The article, titled “Think of GPPP for Inclusive Growth”,stated that it was time PPP was reviewed because it had missed out on the most important component of the developmental model, which is, the common people. Neither Raju nor Akhilesh Yadav was available for comment, but Sivanand Tiwari is of the view thatpro jecting the P4 utterance of Modi as a path-breaking concept is a clear example of overreach in the Modi narrative.

“It would be interest ing to probe whether this overreach was on account of the overwrought PR machinery or the oversight of theChief Minister himself ,” T iwari said.

In the background of these revelations, the Modi saga is beginning to have striking similarities with the India Shining campaignlaunched by the BJP and the NDA in 2004. That campaign, masterminded by the late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, had sought toportray that India was shining in all socio-economic spheres under the stewardship of Prime Minister Vajpayee. Several crores of theparty ’s and the government’s money was spent on the propaganda blitzkrieg with disastrous election results for the NDA. Nine years

later, the BJP’s allies are picking holes in Modi’s development stories. In fact, several BJP and Sangh Parivar leaders consider NitishKumar’s development model in Bihar more people-f riendly.

Goebbelsian propaganda

The Patna-based political analyst Surendra Kishore, who has been closely observing Modi’s centre stage campaign, including itsmanif estations on social media sites, sees def inite streams of Goebbelsian propaganda in all this.

“The attempt is to use any argument, whatever its dimensions and authorship, to communicate and enlist groups and communities.






Printable version | May 2 , 2013 7:47 :44 PM | http://www.f rontline.in/cov er-story/modi-my th/article46667 66.ece

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Consider this. At a meeting organised jointly in Kolkata by the Indian Chamber of Commerce, the MCC Chamber of Commerce and theBharat Chamber of Commerce, Modi concluded his interaction with the assertion that he is not a politician but an apolitical person.This, coming from a man who has been with the RSS since his youth and has been a leader of the BJP for several decades. The point isclear: to appeal to those you are addressing, in this case the business persons, and thus advance your march to capture power, any position would be put f orth, principles and policies be damned. There is an ingrained undemocratic, fascist streak in this wholeapproach. But, of course, there are hundreds of thousands of educated and not-so-educated persons in the cy berspace and socialnetworking sites who would lap it up,” Surendra Kishore told Frontline.

Assessing the overall sequence of events and particularly Modi’s centre stage f orays, the Lucknow-based political analyst ProfessorSudhir Kumar Panwar opined that there was ev ery possibility that this exercise fell within the realm of premature peaking. “Many politicians have fallen prey to this phenomenon in the country’s history. On his part, Modi had no choice but to make his moves at thecurrent juncture. For he also needs time to consolidate his position within the organisation and vis-a-vis the rank and f ile. That has

f etched some limited gains in the form of prominent position the BJP accorded to Modi in the reorganisation of party f unctionaries. Butthe tacit demand to declare him the prime ministerial candidate has already resulted in bickering in the NDA as well as in theconsolidation of ‘secular f orces’ and votes. T he over- exposure in the media may also result in the creation of ‘negative shades’ onaccount of micro-scanning of his ‘development’ plank as well as the ‘autocratic politico-administrative’ style of f unctioning. Above all,questions about his secular credentials will also keep coming up regularly in the days to come,” he said.

Panwar is of the view that the process of micro-scanning has already started with the emergence of the Comptroller and AuditorGeneral’s report castigating the Modi regime f or giving undue benefits to big business houses such as Reliance and Essar as well as themismanagement of drought in vast regions of the State, leading to unprecedented misery among the people. The scrutiny of controversial laws such as the Lokayukta, the Private Universities and Irrigation Bills, as also the re- emergence of the legal tangles of acriminal nature in the form of the protest petition f iled by Zakia Jafri, widow of the slain Congress leader Ehsan Jafri, could reinforcethe ‘peaking early’ phenomenon and put Modi on the back f oot.

Several observers are of the view that the protest petition, relating to the killing of 71 persons, including Ehsan Jaf ri, at Ahmedabad’sGulberg Society on February 28, 2002, could be particularly tricky for Modi as it argues that the Special Investigation Team (SIT)constituted to go into the post-Godhra incidents had let of f Modi without going through all the evidence and urges that the court take

cognisance of this and order his prosecution. The petition, submitted with records, including dispatches of the intelligence departmentand CDs containing mobile phone call details of February 28, points to Modi as the mastermind of the post-Godhra massacre of Muslims. In the wake of this petition, the Modi government, in an exercise aimed at enhancing its secular credentials, decided to seek the death penalty for former BJP Minister Maya Kodnani, who has been sentenced to 28 years in jail in the Naroda Patiya massacrecase. The government may perhaps seek the death sentence f or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) activist Babu Bajrangi, too, who has been sentenced to imprisonment until death in the Naroda Patiya case. Political circles in Gujarat perceive the government’s moveagainst Maya Kodnani as one motivated by the rivalry between Modi and Advani. Whatever the dimensions of this move, in terms of the BJP’s internal politics, a large number of legal and political observers are of the view that the Zakia Jaf ri petition has the potentialto create impediments to Modi’s bid to take centre stage.

However, there is a section in the BJP and the Sangh Parivar which holds the view that the re-emergence of the riot-related casescombined with the new initiatives to present Modi’s developmental model will actually lead to greater polarisation and consolidation onthe Hindutva- development theme, leading to f ar-reaching political benef its. “The support of big corporate houses, who welcome theModi model of development, along with the Hindutva polarisation that these cases might create could well prove a big winner. If thecredit for the victory can be claimed by Modi, nothing can stop his rise to the top position,” said a Delhi-based senior RSS activist.

Even as supporters of Modi harbour such optimism and his detractors in the BJP and the NDA continue to raise questions, a generalprinciple of ten cited as the cornerstone of leadership in coalition politics has also started doing the rounds in political circles, particularly in the NDA. The bon mot on this is: the leadership question in coalition politics is finally decided not only on the parameter of thehighest acceptability among the masses and the support base, but also on the parameter of least unacceptability among the coalitionpartners. Addressing a question on this theme, a senior RSS leader, who could well play a role in the selection process in the BJP,quipped that Modi did indeed score well in the former quotient, but his unacceptability was certainly not the least in the given politicalf irmament. This despite the magical, superhuman powers that his supporters and followers accord to Narendra Damodardas Modi.


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Modi Myth - Frontline