The Billionaire Raj

by James Crabtree

  Goswami’s tilt to the right solved a wider problem created by Narendra Modi’s election. His Times Now heyday came amid the scandals of the Congress era, most obviously in 2011, when he tapped the spirit of the Arab Spring and supported the various anti-corruption protests that commentator Sadanand Dhume dubbed “India’s mini–Tahrir Square moment.”19 Back then, The Newshour still involved plenty of Pakistan-bashing, but its host’s favored quarry was unscrupulous and hypocritical politicians. Modi’s arrival complicated this narrative. For a start, the BJP leader put a stop to most of the mega-scams, drawing oxygen away from the most important source of Goswami’s appeal. Modi’s government was closer to Goswami’s own brand of nationalism too, with tough views on security and uncritical support for the military. Finding his political room for maneuver narrowing, the suspicion was that Goswami had decided to throw his lot in with India’s new prime minister, abandoning in the process the more socially liberal views that had marked his earlier career.

  This impression deepened when news of Republic’s financial backers leaked out. The largest was Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a telecoms tycoon and independent member of India’s upper house, although one generally supportive of the BJP.20 Another was Mohandas Pai, a cerebral technology executive, who often lambasted liberals on Twitter.21 Goswami denied he had drifted to the right, telling me he had no “consistent” political views. “People can’t typecast me. They can’t call me a right-winger because I’m socially liberal,” he said in the car. To prove the point, he gestured out of the window towards the Haji Ali Dargah. A run-down fifteenth-century mosque and mausoleum, it stood on a small island just off the coast, accessible only by foot and illuminated by floodlights as we drove past. “My biggest campaign before my resignation has been the right to pray,” he said of programs badgering authorities to allow women access to religious sites, including the Haji Ali.

  Goswami displayed his liberal views later that evening, when we finally arrived at Mumbai’s press club for an awards ceremony run by an LGBT rights group. He was to give a speech attacking Section 377 of India’s Victorian-era penal code, which banned homosexual acts and which he had criticized frequently on his show. I had expected a glitzy affair with film stars and media personalities. But the gathering was meager, with an audience of barely fifty activists sitting in front of a makeshift stage, including a handful of transgender hijras in colorful saris. We arrived an hour late, but the organizers greeted Goswami as an old friend, thanking him for his support. He went on to give a speech which was at once powerful and touching, talking about his own belief in social tolerance and how he had tried to use his own channel to raise the issue. The applause as he sat down was warm and generous.

  Whatever his own politics, Goswami guarded his views on Modi carefully. When we met the first time in 2014 I had asked him directly what he thought of him. He would say only that the prime minister had a “strong media presence” and was an “effective communicator.” I asked the same question during our car ride and he was similarly evasive, saying only that he and Modi shared a similar distaste for New Delhi’s political establishment. This was true enough: Modi often accused the press of treating him unfairly, sometimes calling journalists “news traders” during speeches.22 He was known to be especially critical of the English-speaking media, including channels such as NDTV, a grudge that dated back to their harsh coverage of the violence that swept through Gujarat in 2002. Yet despite Goswami’s denials, it was hard not to imagine a certain affinity between the two men: both self-described outsiders, both disdainful of traditional New Delhi elites, and both ardent nationalists, keen on projecting unashamed Indian power abroad. Modi was a made-for-television politician, an accomplished orator with a knack for memorable sound-bites and an eye for visual theater. It came as no surprise in 2016 when he picked Goswami to host his first postelection set-piece interview, just as he had during the campaign itself.23

  Goswami and Modi were right in one sense: many senior Indian journalists were indeed liberal in their outlook, broadly supporting the old-style secular nationalism of Jawaharlal Nehru and fretting about the rise of an assertive Hindu identity under the BJP. Republic was also just one example of a tilt to the right in the media. Other channels, forced to respond to Goswami’s style, began to serve up a diet of nationalist outrage. Right-wing commentators, once rare on-screen, became more common.

  This political shift was most marked online, where social media was awash with Modi supporters, known to their detractors as bhakts, a Hindi word typically used to describe unquestioning religious devotees. Normally young men, and always staunch Hindu nationalists, the bhakts swarmed coverage they disliked, using the term “presstitutes” to attack less favored journalists. Anchors such as Rajdeep Sardesai and Barkha Dutt were among their most prominent targets. Goswami, by contrast, was a hero, with clips of his performances shared proudly online. “There can never be enough nationalism,” Goswami said, prior to Republic’s launch. “We have forces that are trying to divide and break India from within. No nation can be soft on anti-nationals.”24 That phrase—“anti-national”—became a common slur after Modi’s election, tarring everyone from Kashmiri peace activists to former central bank governor Raghuram Rajan. Goswami dropped it in liberally on his show.

  Although Goswami was its most prominent advocate, this criticism of India’s old elites spread well beyond the news media. About a year after Modi’s election, I met Amish Tripathi, a former banker turned author of a trilogy of mythological thrillers inspired by the Hindu god Shiva. Tripathi, or just Amish, as his name appeared on his book covers, had become a central figure in a new wave of commercial fiction, aimed at a mass market which preferred potboilers and campus romances to high-minded literature. His trilogy shifted over two million copies, the fastest-selling series in Indian publishing history, retelling stories of Shiva’s adventures in a brisk page-turning style.

  In person, Amish was gentle and thoughtful, but also critical of local publishers, who he said churned out high-minded novels by writers like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, but produced little to the tastes of ordinary readers. “The Indian publishing industry, until around ten years ago, was Indian in name only,” he told me. “It was more of a British publishing industry that happened to be based in India.” Tripathi’s books were not obviously right-wing; their gods and heroes were in fact often surprisingly liberal. But he echoed Goswami’s criticism of the “old elites of Lutyens Delhi and south Mumbai,” and shared his hope that Indian media would soon grow comfortable with a more robust form of nationalism.

  Yet while some welcomed this turn, others worried that India’s media was becoming cowed and uncritical of its new government in particular.25 “With Hindu nationalists trying to purge all manifestations of ‘anti-national’ thought from the national debate, self-censorship is growing in the mainstream media,” Reporters without Borders said in its 2017 report. There were wider worries about creeping media restrictions under Modi too, partly through the use of repressive colonial-era libel and sedition laws. In 2017, police raided the offices of NDTV, as well as the home of Prannoy and Radhika Roy. Although ostensibly an investigation into a disputed bank loan, many viewed the raid as politically inspired. The year before, the channel was threatened with being taken off air for a day, after the government accused it of damaging national security via live coverage of a militant attack on an army base in Kashmir, similar to the assault in Uri.

  Goswami himself seemed untroubled by all this, comfortable perhaps in the fact that his own politics were closer to those of the national mainstream than those of either his rivals or his critics. “It has to be done! And we have to do it now!” he exclaimed suddenly back in the car, as if energized at once by his news channel plans and his pugilistic vision for what Indian media could become. “You see India is on the upsurge. We are doing dramatic things!”

  As I left Goswami later that night, I still found it hard t
o square his flamboyant, rabble-rousing performances on screen with the reasoned and introspective manner he typically displayed off it. Yet in barely five years he had led a revolution in Indian news television, one that seemed sure to have long-lasting consequences. His was a revolt not just against an old establishment, but also against an old idea of India. This was held dear by an older generation of journalists, who hoped that a more cerebral and reflective public sphere could in turn bring about greater social harmony. It was a vision that had gradually been eroded in the decade either side of Modi’s election victory. “On the whole, the credibility he lends to the nationalist cause is such that there is little distinction between Goswami and the state,” as former journalist and poet C. P. Surendran wrote after the launch of Republic.26 Ultimately, however, Goswami and those who supported him were playing on a field that others had created, and upon which a new brand of nationalism was becoming ever more dominant. And more than anyone else, the most important creator of that field was Narendra Modi himself.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE TRAGEDIES OF MODI

  The Rock Star

  Narendra Modi settled down at home one Monday morning in June 2016 and prepared to defend his record. It was to be his first set-piece television interview since taking office two years earlier, fielding questions from an unusually deferential Arnab Goswami. Inside, the scene looked at once domestic and confrontational, as the two men sat opposite one another in identical wooden armchairs, close enough to touch toes. Their venue was a spacious sitting room at what was then still one of India’s most famous addresses: the prime minister’s official residence at 7 Race Course Road. The name changed a few months later, when a BJP parliamentarian complained that the old colonial name did not “match Indian culture.”1 Modi now lives at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg instead.

  “I was completely new in the job. Delhi was new for me,” Modi said at first, reminiscing on those earliest days, when he moved into the complex of squat bungalows that Indian leaders called home. “I was not experienced about this place; I had not even been an MP.”2 Dressed in a cream kurta, his white beard neatly trimmed, the prime minister gave detailed answers in Hindi for more than an hour. At times he rambled on, respectfully uninterrupted, describing the intricacies of policy schemes and recounting a meeting with a ninety-year-old woman who had been forced to sell her four goats to raise funds to build a toilet. At other moments he was curt, displaying flashes of irritation, especially with his critics in the press. “If someone would want to know Modi through the eyes of the media, then he would be disillusioned about which Modi is the real Modi,” he said at one point, referring to himself, as he often does, in the third person. Goswami pressed gently towards the end, asking whether Modi’s various economic plans now risked being overshadowed by the “communal agenda” pushed by zealots within his party’s radical Hindu wing. “I fought elections on the issue of development,” Modi replied bluntly. “I believe that the solution to all problems is in development.”

  Those development ambitions remain daunting. The average Indian earned about $1,600 a year when Modi won his landslide in 2014, lagging far behind Asian countries such as China or Malaysia, with roughly $8,000 and $11,000 apiece.3 Some projections suggest India will reach roughly double its current income level by 2025, placing it firmly among the middle tier of what the World Bank calls “lower-middle-income” economies.4 With luck, within another decade or so, it should reach the level China has attained today. But when people talk airily about India’s “rise,” they are really referring to the stage after that, which could come around the middle of this century, when the country closes in on that magic threshold coveted by all poorer nations: a “high-income” economy, meaning one in which the average person earns $12,236 or more.5

  Put like this, India’s future sounds straightforward, with an almost inevitable sense of upward progress, but it still presupposes the kind of sustained expansion that almost no country has ever managed. Brazil produced a brief but stellar run in the late 1960s and early 1970s, growing at around eight percent a year. Beginning in 1985, Thailand was the world’s fastest-growing nation for the best part of ten years.6 But neither of these countries, nor indeed any other large economy bar China, has ever sustained such rates for more than a decade.7 Most never come close. China’s extraordinary performance gives false hope to other developing countries. It was a dazzling trick, but not one anyone has managed to repeat.

  The human scale of India’s future remains equally intimidating. “There are eight hundred million people below the age of thirty-five in our country,” as Modi told Goswami, talking of their hunger to find modern, well-paying jobs. Too many Indians were stuck in low-skill professions, he admitted, toiling away in positions their children would no longer want. “More than three crore [thirty million] people work as washermen, barbers, milkmen, newspaper vendors, and cart vendors.” Yet Modi’s hopes of meeting the aspirations of his vast and youthful people meant first navigating a trio of perilous economic transitions, all of which now stand at best half completed.

  The first challenge is demographic, as India grapples with a population bulge that will deposit at least ten million young people into its labor market every year for decades, all looking for jobs that presently do not exist.8 The second involves urbanization, as hundreds of millions more look to leave rural poverty for new urban opportunities, straining the country’s already teeming cities. A third relates to the development of manufacturing, a crucial ingredient in the recipe for economic development, but an area where India has long struggled. And all of this is without wrestling with the twin challenges Modi himself placed at the heart of his governing agenda: ending corruption and lifting up those he called “the poorest of the poor.”

  Whichever path is taken, this journey will not be easy. Yet if India can complete it, with an estimated population of 1.7 billion by the middle of this century, it will bring more people into conditions of moderate prosperity than any country in history.9 India would also be the first major world economy to do this as a democracy, rather than turning democratic as it grew prosperous, as happened in America and Britain, or, like China, not being a democracy at all. “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge,” Jawaharlal Nehru said on the evening of August 15, 1947, as his country readied to cast aside the injustices of British colonial rule.10 “India stands forth again, after long slumber and struggle, awake, vital, free and independent.” By 2047, as its people celebrate their centenary, India has a chance to fulfill that destiny: to become history’s second democratic superpower and a beacon for free peoples around the world.

  Modi’s admirers like to see him in just these historic terms, as the man destined to take a nation beset by graft and poverty and wrestle it doggedly towards greatness. “The prime minister is doing for India what Teddy Roosevelt did for America, moving us away from the Gilded Age and towards a new Progressive Era,” Jayant Sinha, the BJP minister, told me in 2015. The comparison was bold but also carefully made: Roosevelt, the macho reformer, anti-corruption campaigner, and trust buster, who held the presidency for seven years from 1901 and ended up immortalized in stone alongside Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln on Mount Rushmore. Placing Modi in such company sounded fanciful. But in 2019, when India is next set to go to the polls, he has a good chance of winning a second national victory, and then going on to become the fourth prime minister to serve ten years in office, after Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Manmohan Singh.

  Modi’s depiction of his early naïveté as prime minister—“Delhi was new for me”—needs to be treated with a touch of skepticism. A three-term chief minister from one of India’s most important states, he understood the capital’s intricacies and power plays well enough. He had lived there as a younger man too, first as an RSS loyalist, then as a BJP apparatchik. Yet he was still an outsider, who grew up far outside the country’s elite and whose popularity
stemmed partly from his opposition to it. His ascent then carried added symbolism: a self-made politician in a nation beset by dynasties, whose successes embodied a certain, rarely realized vision of Indian social mobility. Modi played up his youthful chai-wallah image for political ends, but there remained an undeniable power in his life story: the poor lower-caste boy from Vadnagar who rose to lead a nation.

  Just as importantly, Modi’s victory in 2014 rebuffed the notion that India itself had grown ungovernable, as if its turbulent democracy had become such a drag on its economy that it could not follow China’s rapid process of development. For all of its economic vitality since 1991, India’s political system had grown noticeably weaker. The authority of both the Congress and BJP had ebbed, stolen away by more vital regional rivals, while wobbly coalition governments in New Delhi took on the air of a permanent constitutional feature. Modi’s victory, with its stunning and unexpected scale, reversed all this and brought power coursing back into the national capital. Once in office he proved a largely effective administrator, ending almost entirely the grand scandals that had so bedeviled his immediate predecessor. His sense of purpose transformed the country’s image abroad, too, convincing many that India was retaking its place among the great powers. Some saw an even grander geopolitical moment, heralding the end of an international system in which only America and China counted as truly global players. “Modi has given birth to a truly multipolar world,” as former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani put it in 2015, one year after Modi’s election.11

  1,200 Years a Slave

  For all his popularity, Modi remained a deeply unsettling figure in Indian public life, a place he had held ever since the bloodshed that swept through Gujarat in his earliest days as chief minister. In the years after 2002 he pledged himself to the cause of economic development, and denied firmly any lingering, covert agenda to “Hinduise the nation,” in the words of Vinayak Savarkar, the Hindutva ideologue who had once been an important intellectual influence.12 “Development is also the solution to the tension that people talk about,” as Modi put it, in answer to a question from Arnab Goswami about enmities stirred up by extremist Hindus. “If we provide employment to people, if we ensure there’s food on their plates, if we provide them with facilities and give them education, all the tension will end.”