On the morning of May 16, 2014, when counting of votes polled in the Lok Sabha elections was on, Narendra Modi was alone in his room meditating with no television on and took telephone calls only after 12 pm.
This and several other titbits about Modi, his life – both personal and political – and the poll campaign find mention in a new book The Modi Effect: Inside Narendra Modi’s Campaign to Transform India (Hachette India) by Lance Price, former media advisor to the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Read the exclusive excerpts below.
‘Vote Modi’... not ‘Vote BJP’
Modi is India’s great communicator, on a par with Ronald Reagan, but when he does ‘self-effacing’ he is at his least convincing. He is as egotistical as any politician I have ever met, and his conversation is littered with references to himself in the third person. ‘In all corners of the country,’ he told me, ‘they believed Modi was the only hope and wanted to see him win.’ The highly personalised campaign profoundly irritated some of the BJP’s grandees. They felt sidelined, which is hardly surprising because they had been. And they believed a myth had been created around Modi, turning him into some kind of all-conquering Superman, able to fly without support. In his defence, much of the hype around him was generated by the genuine passion of his supporters, although he certainly did nothing to discourage it. And when it was all over, he thanked them and the many thousands of party foot soldiers for their help in getting him elected. His most persuasive argument for why it had turned into a ‘Vote Modi’, rather than ‘Vote BJP’, campaign was that the country was crying out for leadership. ‘Past elections have shown that the Indian culture is such that people have tremendous faith and trust in the individual. People wanted clarity about who the leading person will be and I was seeing this question being asked in every meeting I attended and was hearing vociferous chants, of “Give us a trusted name not a party name”.’
The Astrologer and Mr. Modi
(In the waiting room at 7 Race Course Road before my first meeting with Modi)
The conversation took an unusual turn when we were joined by a tall man in white robes with the Hindu tilak, a red dot and horizontal line, painted on his forehead. He was a holy man and an astrologer and, without prompting, offered some predictions, all of them flattering, for most of us in the room…
Using the suffix ‘ji’ as a mark of respect, he told me… Modi would be in power until 2032, with only a short break in opposition. Most of that time he would have an absolute majority in parliament, only once having to work in coalition with other parties…
While I didn’t ask Modi about the holy man on that occasion, he clearly does listen to those who claim to be able to see into his future. He later told me the story of meeting another astrologer not long after his first election as chief minister of his home state of Gujarat in 2002. Why, he asked her, had nobody predicted he would get the job? ‘She responded by saying that her prediction was that God had the prime minister’s position in store for the future. Basically we have a belief in our religion, Maro Bhagya Vidhata, which means I am putting myself at the disposition for what God has in store for me. If this is the case why be afraid? I have never worn a bullet-proof jacket.’
Kejriwal, A ‘Small’ Leader
(In an Interview before the 2015 Delhi Elections)
Modi was unmoved. He decided never to mention Arvind Kejriwal by name between then and polling day. He certainly wasn’t willing to cede to the AAP leader the mantle of the anti-corruption candidate, but he also showed himself to be much the superior political tactician. ‘My silence is my strength,’ he told me. ‘Narendra Modi knows the strength of silence. You should know that in the grand scheme of things, Kejriwal was nothing but a small single city leader. He was getting far more coverage than he deserved as compared to other more established opposition party leaders. So why spend time even ignoring someone? It was therefore not even worth my time to ignore Kejriwal. Kejriwal was elevated by a select group of vested media interests fuelled by the Congress to target Narendra Modi and try and save the Congress. Keep in mind he was not even a member of parliament; had lasted only forty-nine days as CM, and had won less than 1% of the national vote.’
The Controversial Ad That Was Never Aired
(Post Modi’s Varanasi rally being banned)
Advertising guru Piyush Pandey had seen the events unfold on TV, so when the phone rang he was not surprised to find the other Piyush – Goyal – on the line. He wanted an urgent ad prepared for broadcast within twenty-four hours. Goyal was still fired up with a sense of injustice. He approved a doubling of the advertising budget for the day and ordered a short film that would reflect the passions of the occasion. ‘The message was to be around, “we will not stop, whatever happens”,’ he told me. Pandey duly obliged, working long into the night to complete the hardest-hitting spot of the whole campaign. At 4.31 a.m. he attached the video to a WhatsApp message and pressed send. Three months later, as I sat around the dinner table with Goyal and his wife, he pulled out his phone. He had kept the message and passed me the device so I could watch it. Even without understanding the Hindi commentary, I could tell immediately that it was powerful stuff. The young men in the crowds looked threatening and the musical overlay was like something from the trailer to a horror movie. He told me that the key section of the voice-over, delivered in a portentous tone, translated as, ‘We are unstoppable, this fire will not stop. Greetings to the citizens, this is a storm of change.’ I couldn’t help but feel that it was more reminiscent of scenes from a Hitler Youth rally than a democratic protest.
After a few hours’ sleep, Goyal awoke and realised the ad was a big mistake. ‘I realised the first idea was not a good one. We could not end on an aggressive note,’ he said. ‘Now was the time to go more softly, to bring in inclusiveness and talk about the love and affection shown by the people. So I called up Piyush and asked him to make the ad again. After three or four iterations, the script was finalised at 1.00 p.m.’ This version, which he also showed me, had some of the same footage, but the intimidating music had gone and the tone sounded much more positive. ‘I got a WhatsApp message at 5.45 p.m. saying that the ad had been approved by the Election Commission and at 6.30 p.m. it broke on TV.’ He had missed the deadline he had set for himself, but only by thirty minutes.
Modi and The Media
Looking in from the outside, most observers came to the conclusion that Team Modi had very little to complain about in the way the campaign was being covered… Rahul Kanwal, who covered the election for Headlines Today, agreed that Modi constantly gave journalists what they wanted most: stories. ‘He is brilliant copy. He’s the best copy India has ever had.’
Almost everything he did made news: the tea stalls, the holograms, the mammoth open-air rallies. For Kanwal, as a television journalist, Modi was a dream. ‘When he is speaking, he is the director, the producer, the editor, the copywriter, the actor, the superstar, all in the same person. Because when he is speaking you see, when he wants the crowd to respond to what he is saying, he turns the mic towards them. So he is very theatrical, very Bollywood in that sense. He has a better sense of occasion, of timing, of television, of cameras, of production than virtually anybody else. He is smarter when it comes to production than most TV producers.’ And if that includes speaking over the heads of the journalists, through social media or at public rallies, ‘It’s not something that you like, but what option do you have? He functions in the way that he does. You can’t change it. You can clamour as much as you want, you can crib as much as you want, he’s not going to change.’ Aatish Srivastava, who covered the BJP for the NewsX channel, concurred. ‘Suddenly the media, which was dead against him, realised that he is going to be the Prime Minister of the country.’ And some journalists were prepared to admit that there were other constraints on what they could write. ‘We are all corporate-run media houses now. There is no one who is doing it as a social service,’ said one.
The ‘3D Rallies’... Playing God
The rallies proved so popular that local campaign teams started to inundate the war room with requests to be included. The number and frequency of the rallies was increased, putting yet more strain on the logistics. In rural areas lorries would get stuck on muddy roads, loose electrical wires would prevent the tall trucks from passing and trees would obstruct the route. But there was an almost over- whelming demand from the public to be met – so much so that one afternoon an organiser rang the central controllers in fear. One of the trucks carrying power equipment was still a hundred kilometres away and he told them, ‘These village people are saying they will not let me go if a 3D rally doesn’t happen here today’. The situation was resolved at the last minute and Modi made a point of name-checking the village so his volunteer could sleep easy that night.
The appeal of the holograms is not hard to fathom. They were pure spectacle, bringing a touch of glamour to places that were often far from a cinema and where perhaps only a few – if any – of the villagers had access to a television. But the BJP’s official spokesman during the campaign, Prakash Javadekar, suggested that it wasn’t just the element of extravaganza that caught the people’s imagination. Modi was close to becoming deified. ‘In Hindu mythology,’ he told me, ‘like in other religions, God is omnipresent. If you are a believer, you believe God is everywhere. So, Modi is addressing them from a different place but he is there. Thousands were listening and people could photograph themselves with him. The photograph would also have Modi in the picture. So it was a big hit, especially in the rural areas.’ Were the people looking for another God? I asked him. He hesitated briefly. ‘Another hero.’
(Lance Price is a British writer, journalist and political commentator who has authored four books.)