Modi: Voters saw me as the only hope

Taking full credit for the BJP’s victory in the Lok Sabha elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said he heard vociferous demands for a “trusted name and not a party name” all through his campaign and that people “believed Modi was the only hope”.

In a series of interviews to British author Lance Price — whose book, The Modi Effect: Inside Narendra Modi’s Campaign to Transform India, was released recently — the PM also dismissed Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal, who contested against him from Varanasi, as “nothing but a small single city leader” elevated by a group of “vested media interests fuelled by the Congress” to target him.

“In all corners of the country, they believed Modi was the only hope and wanted to see him win,” Modi told the former BBC correspondent and Downing Street communications expert, explaining the highly-personalised campaign.

The remarks fly in the face of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and BJP patriarch LK Advani’s assertions that the victory was a result of people’s desire for change and not due to “any individuals”.

“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.”

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.

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.