'If you're planning to write about Modi you just meet him and write what he wants you to write'

by Guest Wed Oct 16, 2013 1:33 pm

While I was in Gandhinagar, the time for my appointment with Modi had arrived. I contacted Modi’s man, Jagdish Thakkar, a day in advance. A few hours later, he called me and said, “Sorry, Modiji said he can’t meet you. Extremely sorry, not possible.” For the next few months, I followed up with additional requests: letters, text messages, phone calls. But there was no response, and no indication of what had led Modi to change his mind.

“If he had really meant to meet you in Songadh,” a senior journalist in Gujarat told me, “and then backed out, then it must be because there was too much intelligence gathered on the kind of people you interviewed here. Did you by any chance meet people like Gordhan Zadaphia?” the journalist asked. Yes, I said. “Ok, that would have definitely irritated him. Did you do ‘riot-tourism’?” If you mean visiting the neighbourhoods destroyed in 2002, I said, then yes, I did visit them.

“If you’re planning to write about Modi, you just go to him, and you write what he wants you to write,” the journalist said, acidly. “You don’t hang around in Gujarat meeting all kinds of people. He knows, of course, that you’re a pseudo-secularist with a prejudice against him—so why should he meet you?”

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/emperor-uncrowned

by Guest Wed Oct 16, 2013 1:46 pm

But Modi’s version of events is contradicted by several other senior BJP leaders, who said that Modi had lobbied hard for the job from the time he arrived in Delhi. “He knew the Gujarat BJP wouldn’t have elected him as the CM,” one BJP leader told me, “so it had to be an appointment from the centre, top-down, because the Gujarat leaders had realised how divisive and self-righteous Modi could be.” In fact, Modi was known to have presented a few news editors in Delhi with suggestions for negative stories about Patel. Vinod Mehta, the former editor-in-chief of Outlook, recalls one such visit in his memoirs: “When he was working at the party office in Delhi, Narendra Modi came to see me in the office. He brought along some documents which indicated the chief minister of Gujarat, Keshubhai Patel, was up to no good. The next thing I heard was that he had become the chief minister in place of Keshubhai.”

- See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/emperor-uncrowned#sthash.Ea0qxatm.dpuf

by Guest Wed Oct 16, 2013 1:49 pm

IN A FAMOUS ESSAY published in Seminar a few months after the riots in 2002, sociologist Ashis Nandy, one of India’s foremost public intellectuals, described having interviewed Modi more than a decade earlier, in the late 1980s, when the future chief minister was “a nobody, a small-time RSS pracharak trying to make it as a small-time BJP functionary”.

Nandy, who was trained as a clinical psychologist, recalled his impressions of Modi during their “long, rambling interview”:

It left me in no doubt that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist. I never use the term ‘fascist’ as a term of abuse; to me it is a diagnostic category comprising not only one’s ideological posture but also the personality traits and motivational patterns contextualising the ideology.

Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence—all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist.

- See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/emperor-uncrowned#sthash.0e8Mw5pc.dpuf

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'If you're planning to write about Modi you just meet him and write what he wants you to write'

'If you're planning to write about Modi you just meet him and write what he wants you to write'

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Re: 'If you're planning to write about Modi you just meet him and write what he wants you to write'

Re: 'If you're planning to write about Modi you just meet him and write what he wants you to write'