This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  Jindal kept the confidence of both prime ministers, never revealing the occasional unofficial role he had been entrusted with. Unlike special envoys in the past, his role was obviously not one that involved negotiating tricky matters of geopolitics. He was more like a covert bridge that connected them if either wanted to reach out to the other side sans protocol or publicity. Because Jindal’s part in the Indo-Pak drama was strictly off the record, it came with plausible deniability. When I was first told about the arrangement by a principal protagonist in the know, I considered reporting it for the news but decided against it, as I knew not one of the key players would go on record except to repudiate it.

  But enough people in diplomatic and business circles in both countries knew about Jindal’s mediatory role. Except the media—which had been badly thrown off the scent by the seemingly frosty dynamics between Modi and Sharif when they met in Kathmandu in November 2014 for the annual conference of South Asian nations. Television anchors were airing the usual speculations about whether the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers would meet. Everyone was looking out for ‘the handshake’. There were precedents to this sort of conjecturing, especially where SAARC summits were concerned. In January 2002, Pervez Musharraf took India by surprise by striding across the room and clasping Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s hand in a firm grip. Taken aback for a second, Vajpayee then rose from his seat to reciprocate the gesture amid loud cheers from fellow delegates. This was just a few weeks after the attack on India’s Parliament. Then there was the ‘Thimphu Thaw’ where Manmohan Singh and his counterpart Yousaf Gilani came together and posed for cameras their hands interlinked in a show of warmth. This time around, there didn’t seem to be much chance of such amity.

  The television channels were broadcasting footage on a loop that appeared to have caught a grim looking Modi studiously examining a newspaper whilst an equally impassive Sharif walked past him to make his address. There was no eye contact between the two men; they seemed to be ignoring each other altogether. It was evidence, journalists proclaimed, of the frostiness in ties between the two countries. The more ‘patriotic’ channels termed it a grand snub. At the close of the two-day conference, when Sharif and Modi finally shook hands and smiled for the cameras, flanked by other heads of state, the media was excitable and ready to draw conclusions. ‘Finally!’ said one headline, ‘Summit salvaged by handshake’ said another, once again suggesting that the two countries had just about come back from the brink of a total collapse in communication.

  But as the op-eds were being written and the limitations of ‘the handshake’ were being debated to death on prime time television, a ‘secret’ meeting between Modi and Sharif had gone entirely undetected. Bombastic commentators, including those of the BJP, were decreeing the Nepal trip to be yet more proof of a tough new Pakistan policy. Even at the leaders-only retreat at the resort in Dhulikhel, an opportunity to talk more casually, the interaction between the two had been described as strictly an ‘exchange of pleasantries’. The public image of enforced politeness and actual friction between the two was authentic only to the extent that a structured encounter was never part of the plan. However, on reaching Kathmandu, the prime minister had called Sajjan Jindal and asked him to hop on to the earliest flight to Nepal. Jindal was asked to discreetly reach out to his ‘friend’ across the border. Subsequently, the two prime ministers were able to meet quietly in the privacy of Jindal’s hotel room in Nepal, where they are said to have spent an hour together. Elections in the sensitive state of Jammu and Kashmir were just a month away and Modi explained that while he was keen to find ways to reopen some formal channels, circumstances did not permit him to do so immediately. Sharif, in turn, told him about the constrictions imposed on him by the security establishment in Pakistan—his negotiating power with the army had been gradually whittled away. Both agreed they needed some more time and greater political space to move forward publicly. This under-the-radar encounter paved the way for Modi to openly reach out to Nawaz Sharif two months later through a phone call that was positioned as an innocuous good-luck call for the World Cup, but could be traced back to that moment in Nepal when both sides set the ball rolling.

  I was told this story of Jindal’s role as an intermediary at a dinner where many big names from the business community were present. I was asked, more than once, how the media had missed it altogether. The telling part of the story to me was the contrast with the memory of that night in New York when Modi’s fierce outburst at an election rally in Delhi had drawn me into its vortex and made its impact felt on the first and last meeting Manmohan Singh ever had with Nawaz Sharif. A pragmatist had clearly replaced the polemicist.

  There were other noticeable shifts in Modi’s foreign policy that were a clear departure from his years in the Opposition. The land boundary agreement with Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina, for instance, which involved a swap of enclaves between Assam, West Bengal, Meghalaya and Tripura with Bangladesh. The agreement had been signed between Manmohan Singh and Hasina in 2011 but needed a constitutional amendment to make it operational. Right up to 2013, the BJP had bitterly opposed the move and argued that the territory of India could not be altered by an amendment to its constitution. Once in power, Modi argued that it would be one way of stopping illegal immigration and would bolster ties with the Awami League government. Steering the passage of the legislation he then walked across the aisle to personally thank Sonia Gandhi and other Opposition leaders for their support.

  One could be clichéd and label these modifications, some subtle, some dramatic, as ‘U-turns’ that are typical of Indian politics. But, because in so many ways Modi himself had been the main issue of the election that catapulted him into power, and because never before had there been so many assumptions about and expectations of a prime ministerial candidate, his shifts were more significant than the prosaic flip-flops that we were used to. He was certainly going to leave us all guessing.

  ■

  To conclude this section on Narendra Modi, I’d like to describe his relationship with the media. He was instinctively suspicious of journalists; especially those he believed had been critical of him after the 2002 Gujarat riots. While he was chief minister, successive political victories had made him impervious to the comments of the media. The scale of his win in 2014 made him think that his office in Delhi would not need engagement with the press either. He dispensed with the post of media adviser and stopped journalists from accompanying him on his aircraft when he travelled abroad. Most media people still hot-footed it on their own, shadowing his every move across the globe, but typically neither he—nor any senior official in his government—would even meet informally with the press corps on these trips. Unlike Manmohan Singh—who never gave interviews and faced the media officially at a press conference only three times in ten years—Modi did give interviews when he became prime minister. However, these were only to journalists he did not dislike.

  At first, when Modi was still CM, I would follow him on the campaign trail just as I would any other politician. As his ‘rath’ criss-crossed its way across the state, reporters would hop on for small stretches of the ride where he would give them short interviews. As a professional it was my job to try to get an interview as well, and so I did. Until I discovered that while Modi would talk to even local stringers in the interior villages of Gujarat, he would not talk to me.

  Over the years I came to believe that while Modi may have disliked some of us, more than any personal antipathy he rather enjoyed the idea of doing battle with whichever media person he had designated as an antagonist or enemy; just as he battled his ‘foes’ in politics, so did he fight his ‘enemies’ in the media. He seemed to relish a good scrap—and even better, a victory. The ‘othering’ of the media—or at least sections of it—was part of this. Modi, who felt the English language media had vilified him during the riots, did not forget who had said what. And now he believed the tables had turned.

  I only had one brief conversation with Narendra Mod
i before he became prime minister and that was at the Chennai wedding of the son of my friend Shobhana Bhartia, the well-liked owner of the Hindustan Times. Bhartia’s son was getting married to the daughter of Mukesh and Anil Ambani’s sister Nina and there were several politicians, film stars and businessmen in attendance.

  I moved aside as I saw Modi arriving, not wanting any awkwardness at the table I was sitting at. In the course of the evening, I saw well-known lawyer Raian Karanjawala and adman Suhel Seth at the same table as the man who would be prime minister. They waved to me to join them. Modi was polite and we made some small talk; I even managed a half-joke about how I thought he would not wish to talk to me. He (half) joked back saying he had no intention of giving me an interview; talking was just fine.

  Later, after he became prime minister, Modi began to meet groups of journalists at dinners organized at Arun Jaitley’s residence. The only two people I knew who were not invited to meet him were my former NDTV colleague Rajdeep Sardesai—who had fronted the coverage of the Gujarat riots—and myself.

  Yet, for all the antipathy he displayed towards some journalists, Modi was the most media-savvy politician India had ever seen. He was also the one whose deeply felt dislike for the media would express itself in phrases like ‘news traders’, which he coined while in the Opposition, and ‘bazaaru’ (bought) which he used while canvassing for the Delhi state elections. His relationship with the media aside, there was no question that Modi was a brilliant communicator (which was what made his silences—whenever his partymen made inflammatory statements or when there were incidents that deserved stiff and unequivocal condemnation—worthy of comment and speculation). He was also a successful practitioner of a new kind of politics that the rest of the political class was still trying to catch up to.

  You could call it the ‘Modi’fication of Indian politics or perhaps more accurately the Americanization of our democracy. Raymond Vickery, a former member of the Clinton administration, once told me that Narendra Modi was ‘simultaneously the easiest and hardest kind of partner for the United States to deal with—easiest because in some important ways he is so American in his outlook and the hardest for the very same reason’. The show of strength for Modi at New York’s Madison Square Garden, with repeat performances in Australia and Canada, was seen as an American-style statement of clout that several commentators compared to the atmosphere of a presidential nomination.

  The cult of personality, the emphasis on charisma and communication, the assertion of fierce and complete political supremacy—Modi had effectively pushed politics from a parliamentary model to a presidential one where the fortunes of parties now depended on the personas of their leaders. More Indira Gandhi than any other comparable figure, his capture of power inside his own party was complete. The geriatric rebels of the party had literally been put out to pasture. During the election campaign one of them, who was likely contesting the last election of his life, whispered to me before the cameras came on that the ‘BJP was now a dictatorship’. But beyond the carping, faced with his own electoral irrelevance, there was not much he could do. Even ministers like Sushma Swaraj—widely considered one of Modi’s most charismatic colleagues—seemed diminished compared to her years as a fiery and voluble Leader of the Opposition. When Modi was initially putting together his Cabinet, Swaraj had insisted that she be treated like an equal. She told the prime minister she would only become part of his Cabinet if he treated her as a peer—like two people sitting together on a sofa, she said, and having a conversation and not a situation where one person is expected to sit at the other’s feet. But once in government it was the prime minister who overshadowed her foreign affairs ministry, relegating the talented Swaraj to the sidelines. When the Lalit Modi cricket scandal hit her (and in Rajasthan, the chief minister, Vasundhara Raje), and when an admissions controversy engulfed the Madhya Pradesh chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the word in the party was that Modi had demolished all three leaders who could challenge him or who had taken Advani’s side against him in the past. When Advani and Joshi were appointed to the party’s ‘margdarshak mandal’ (advisory board), Nitish Kumar, ally of the BJP for seventeen years and now Modi’s bête noire joked to me, ‘Rajnath will be the next leader to be banished to the margdarshak club.’ This, about a minister holding a portfolio once regarded as the second most powerful in government. Modi’s hold over the party was complete and nothing but electoral defeat in the states was going to dent that. By becoming more important than his party Modi marked a new phase of politics where the model of political domination he constructed began to be replicated in other newer parties as well, including the Aam Aadmi Party.

  Modi had understood that India’s new politics was a marketplace of ideas in which the leader is a branded product and the voter a perennial consumer of political content. He heralded a new communications age wherein fiercely individualistic leaders seek a strong connection with the masses to reinforce the imprint of their own personality on the larger political ecosystem. It’s what Bernard Manin, professor of Politics at New York University has called ‘audience democracy’, in describing a new kind of representative government where politics is mediated by the mass media and ‘the electorate responds to the terms that have been presented on the political stage’. In his book, The Principles of Representative Government, Manin outlines three kinds of democracy—parliamentary democracy, party democracy and audience democracy—arguing that the most recent variation of image-driven politics is as legitimate a form of representative government as any other. So, if political dialogue previously took place inside Parliament, now it unfolds in the public domain, in television studios, on social media, or even in gossip around the digital version of an old-style water cooler.

  Modi’s made-for-media politics in which strategic communication was a key component was constantly on display. A perfect example was the visit of President Barack Obama to India as chief guest at the country’s Republic Day celebrations in 2015. The manly hug between the two leaders, the hard to miss symbolism of Modi, once a tea vendor, pouring tea from a silver teapot for arguably the world’s most powerful man, the intimate setting of the joint-radio broadcast, the huddling under umbrellas on a rain-soaked Rajpath—this was strategic communication at its best.

  Several parallels have already been drawn between Modi and Obama, their rise from modest backgrounds (the grandson of a cook and a tea-seller’s son as the US president described it), their self-proclaimed status of being outsiders to Delhi and Washington respectively, and their embrace of social media and technology to run intensely personality-driven election campaigns. But they were also similar in their flair for showmanship. In an age of hyper-information and shrinking, overloaded attention spans both understood the value of telling a good story. Even the fact that Modi did not hesitate to cry in front of the camera was not typical of the conventional Indian politician. To be personal in public was the American way.

  Obama’s parting shot on the need to uphold religious tolerance in India—‘India will succeed so long as it’s not splintered along the lines of religious faith’—may have pointed to the limitations of packaging, oratory and theatrics. But it did not detract from the dramatic transformation that has taken place in Indian politics where, as technology-enabled outreach increases, the actual relevance of journalists is declining. Once upon a time, when private television began in India, ‘camera-friendly’ referred to politicians who would play the role of jesters for television. Think Lalu Yadav in the years he would never be photographed without his cows or Farooq Abdullah diving into Dal Lake. Their antics and affected buffoonery were designed to draw laughs and some affection, but never did it give them control of the political narrative. Today, as politicians learn the art of creating news events to stay in the headlines, they have understood that the media will never look away from a moment of drama. As long as they can keep generating drama they can actually avoid institutionalized engagement with the media. They can be the news without talking t
o the press.

  III

  If Rahul Gandhi’s communication strategy was ineffectual and Modi’s was masterful but hostile to large sections of the media, one man’s embrace of the media space was complete—at least in the initial years when he was still an anti-corruption activist and not yet a full time politician.

  I first met Arvind Kejriwal when he was a Right to Information (RTI) activist and a winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award who sought the support of our television network to campaign for transparency in governance.

  Even in his pre-politics years there was a brooding intensity and a single-minded focus to him. Unlike Rahul, who would effortlessly alternate between Polo-tees, open-collared shirts, bomber jackets and kurta-pyjamas, and Modi whose trademark half-sleeve kurtas even compelled Obama to call the prime minister a fashion icon, Kejriwal, who used to rotate just two sweaters through the entire Delhi winter, had no interest in clothes or appearances. His shirts were unstarched, his feet were usually shod in chappals and all he wanted to do was get on with the task at hand. Kejriwal was a man in a hurry. His impatience betrayed a simmering restlessness that he was able to channel into the birth of a new political party.

  India’s anti-corruption movement took root in 2011 against the backdrop of a slew of corruption scandals that had embroiled the Manmohan Singh government. Telecom, coal, the Commonwealth Games—it appeared as if in almost every corner of the economic life of the nation you could find examples of the unsavoury links between big business and the state. Ashutosh Varshney and Jayant Sinha—who is now a minister in the Modi government—had dubbed the season of ceaseless scams as ‘India’s Gilded Age’. The reference was to a term coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873 to describe a phase of huge economic growth in American history that was accompanied by wide-ranging corruption. As activists of what was known as the ‘Progressive Movement’ trashed their country’s super-wealthy business families as ‘robber barons’ and accused them of manipulating the system for private profit, they vowed to clean up politics. Kejriwal was the Indian version of the Progressives, fashioning an entire party from the middle-class disillusionment with corruption and their craving for a third alternative to the BJP and the Congress.