The Modi Effect: Inside Narendra Modi’s Campaign to Transform India
By Lance Price, Quercus, 339 pages, $27
For a political spin-doctor it must have been an irresistible opportunity — and Lance Price did not resist when the winner of the biggest democratic exercise in history offered to tell him how he won the Indian general election of 2014.
Price — a former BBC political correspondent, adviser to Tony Blair from 1998-2001 and author of “The Spin Doctor’s Diary” (2005) — is rightly awed by the energy of Indian democracy and the “shock and awe” campaign that ended a decade of Congress rule to bring Narendra Modi to power at the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
About 554 million voted, the turnout of 66.4 per cent was the highest since independence, and the BJP became the first party in a generation — and the first in Indian history other than Congress — to win a straight majority of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament.
Price says Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron pointed out to Modi on May 16, the day the results were announced, that he had just won more votes than any other politician “anywhere in the universe”.
Modi and his advisers decided to launch a “presidential” campaign focused on the character and achievements of the man who was then chief minister of Gujarat. It was a calculated risk, given that Modi’s reputation was tarnished by the massacre of hundreds of Muslims on his watch in Gujarat in 2002, and that his critics had begun to question the advertised success of his economic and social policies in the state in the decade that followed.
Helped by his own years of experience as a BJP organiser, by his political right-hand man Amit Shah and by a coterie of young, tech-savvy Indians, Modi travelled 300,000 kilometres and appeared at 5,857 events, many of them via holographic transmissions that had him addressing villagers live in 100 locations at once.
His first national television interview of the election campaign, which was carried out in nine phases across India over five weeks, was watched by three-quarters of news viewers and achieved the highest TV ratings in Indian history. Meanwhile, Modi, an early convert to social media among Indian politicians, amassed 14 million Facebook fans.
Probably his greatest advantage in the television age is his skill at public speaking. “The Blairs, Thatchers and Clintons all knew how to woo their audiences,” writes Price. “The words of Barack Obama will be quoted for generations to come. But none of them ever engaged a crowd with such fervent, visceral passion as Narendra Modi. If success in politics were just about that, Modi would have no equal in the world today.”
This is no exaggeration, as anyone who has attended a Modi rally and watched him perform can attest. Price — despite enjoying the rare privilege of hours of one-on-one meetings with Modi at his official residence at 7 Race Course Road in New Delhi — is suitably sceptical about other aspects of Modi’s image as the man who rose from tea-seller to prime minister by way of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the rightwing Hindu organisation that fathered the BJP and is regarded by its liberal critics as a quasi-fascist group.
“Modi is India’s great communicator, on a par with Ronald Reagan,” writes Price after hearing Modi insist at length on his lack of personal ambition, “but when he does ‘self-effacing’ he is at his least convincing. He is as egotistical as any politician I have ever met.”
Price is not the first writer to describe Modi’s victory. In India, TV anchor Rajdeep Sardesai’s “2014: The Election that Changed India” captures the drama of the campaign and, indeed, Sardesai is one of the many journalists and politicians quoted in The Modi Effect.
What Price brings to the debate is the spin-doctor’s perspective. He dissects Modi’s strategic and tactical decisions, the social media interventions starting as far back as 2010, the advertising campaigns, the media coverage and the role of the three crucial “ecosystems” that won Modi the election: the RSS (which says it had a million people attending its meetings every day across India), the BJP itself, and the crucial “army of new volunteers”, many of them young Indians who returned from abroad to campaign for Modi.
The funding of the campaign, unfortunately, remains a mystery, as does the exact cost of the expensive hologram shows. There are limits on the campaign spending of candidates but not on that of political parties, and all we know is that the technology was so pricey that BJP candidates had to avoid attending shows in their own constituencies for fear of breaking the law. The two main parties are engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” over how much they spend and where the money comes from.
A bigger disappointment is that Modi seems to have said almost nothing revelatory in his first extensive conversations with a foreign writer since coming to power. The closest we come to a personal insight is when Modi is asked whether he might have abandoned a big rally in Patna, disrupted by bombs that killed six people, if he had a wife and children to consider. Modi seems lost for words: “Perhaps, but I have never had them so how can I know?” Then he adds: “But I have a mother. I have brothers.”
Modi’s life and the performance of the new government is beyond the scope of Price’s book. Like Blair and Obama, Modi is evidently an extraordinary orator and politician. But, to paraphrase former New York governor Mario Cuomo, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose.
Modi has always insisted he is more of a doer than a talker, but nine months on Indians are beginning to wonder whether he is as good a prime minister as he was a campaigner. He might want to heed Arun Shourie, the man he passed over as finance minister, who tells Price he is disappointed by the pace of change and quotes the Buddha as saying: “Live every day like your hair is on fire”. That, after all, is what Modi did on the campaign trail to become prime minister in the first place.
–Financial Times