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If one was ever asked to describe a single moment or event that epitomises the characteristics of Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, it would undoubtedly be a pleasant January night in Gandhinagar in 2005. The second Vibrant Gujarat Summit was due to open the next morning and preparations were a tad slow. Those were still early days at organising such events which are now become commonplace in Gujarat and word of lingering work somehow reached Modi ensconced in his chief ministerial complex. Senior officers were caught off balance and afraid when they heard the chief ministerial convoy grind to halt outside the venue. Would they be chided publicly? Would the infamous steely gaze be cast on them?
However, they did not have to worry about such fate. It did not take Modi more than a few moments to realize which were the gaps that needed to be plugged and he got around to supervising the remaining work – and this included erecting a few tents and strapping makeshift separators or partitions to create cubicles for participants to sit and have a private business tête-à-tête. “It was not exactly a marriage style bandobast – that needed to be done, but Modi acted as if it was not his government’s event but as though it was his daughter’s marriage,” says a former top bureaucrat and one-time key Modi aide.
Modi was assisted and promoted by several senior leaders in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party in his early days. Before they fell out due to his rising ambition and his Guru’s desire to aim for the prime minister’s post, Lal Krishna Advani was a constant source of support and strength for Modi. A couple of years ago, Advani famously said that Modi was a great event manager. Traces of these are already evident in barely four months that he has been prime minister. He began with one of the most finely choreographed swearing in ceremonies and has followed it up during visits by foreign leaders to India, for instance during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit or his own trips abroad. Not a single move has been unplanned and is aimed with the intention of ensuring maximum publicity. It would not be very hazardous to claim that Modi’s decision to play the taiko drums in Japan was pre-arranged and not a spontaneous gesture.
Having known about him for a period long enough to make fair deductions, if there is any single attribute of Modi that anyone can learn from him, it is his capacity to punish himself in pursuit of his goal.
Calling him a slave-driver as is the wont of most, would be ignoring the extent of his commitment to his objective. It would be more appropriate to term Modi as a monster to his own self. Some of this obviously rubs on to others.
No wonder that among the rare jokes that have surfaced in the four months after he became prime minister pertains to his partiality for exhausting colleagues to the brink of collapse. At a recent public event where Modi was focus in absentia, Finance and Defence Minister Arun Jaitley joked that while Modi’s slogan as chief minister was the oft-attributed Na Khaoonga, Na Khane Doonga (I shall not accept bribes nor allow anyone to take), his colleagues are now learning that there is an internal variant too: Na Sounga, Na Sone Doonag (I shall not sleep and shall not allow others to sleep). Modi requires very little sleep and if often at work well past midnight and up much before the crack of dawn.
Peculiarities however dog most public figures and Modi is no different. On one hand is his austere daily schedule where food is either bland or vegetarian sweetish Gujarati dishes. He keeps his personal finances scrupulously untarnished. Yet, from the beginning he was extremely conscious about grooming.
As a child he would fold his clothes and keep them below the mattress he slept on so it had a creased look in the morning when he went to school. The habit continued in the RSS and unlike other swayamsevaks he never had the just-out-of-bed look.
Over years as Modi prospered politically, his style became more flamboyant. In barely a couple of years of Modi becoming chief minister, stores started selling half sleeves kurtas named after him. Today, Modi is one of the most immaculately dressed politicians not just in India but also internationally.
Despite frowns of even sections of his own fraternity, he continues wearing expensive branded spectacles and watches besides taking out the most expensive of pens with a flourish.
His childhood steeped in poverty has been done to ad nauseam in reams of paper since his past became public following the spurt of interest in him. Yet, before he realized during election campaign that it would be a convenient tool to score political brownie points over his rivals, several of whom were born with silver spoons in their mouth; Modi never ever romanticized his underprivileged background or used it to leverage his rise and growth within the Sangh Parivar.
Debate on political stance and his handling of the situation in Gujarati after the Godhra carnage will probably dog him till eternity.
The controversy over this has ironically also been Modi’s enabling instrument. If it had not been for Godhra there would have been no communal violence of the scale that occurred in 2002. If the riots had not occurred, one is not sure if Modi would have been able to lead the BJP to victory in assembly polls that were due in the first quarter of 2003. Yet Modi did not choose to limit himself to being the creation of fate. He embarked to shaping his own destiny by taking cue from popular sentiment that after handing over a stunning mandate in December 2002, also asked him to enable the state to rebuild its economics and get on with smooth governance.
Modi is his own man in more than one way yet he has not abandoned his ideological genealogy. If he allowed the extreme fringe in his party to run a polarising campaign during the recently concluded bye-elections in Uttar Pradesh, he did it probably out of his own volition to test the ground when the stakes were low and not because of any compulsion.
Modi interprets his mandate as two pronged: On the one hand he has to ensure that governance deficit is reversed, faith of the people on the system is restored and he has to put the economy back on track besides of course redeem India’s pride on the international arena.
On the other hand Modi considers that the verdict is about putting several aspects of India’s past behind.
Modi seeks to redefine India and leave some baggage behind. It is daunting task and he may end up changing himself a wee bit. But for the moment, his supporters believe that Indians have given a head start by a mandate unprecedented in three decades. Regardless of disagreement with the way others may view his politics and style of functioning, it needs to be acknowledged that Indians vote for him despite all the negativity surrounding his persona.
It is up to Modi to seize this opportunity and ensure his iconic status. It is up to Modi to do enough to ensure that few decades later, the prime minister or chief executive of that time decides to build Modi’s statue next to the one of Sardar Patel, like the one he has initiated on the Sardar Sarovar.
(The writer is author of “Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times.”)