Vinod Jose: The Rise of Narendra Modi

by Guest Tue Apr 08, 2014 3:03 pm

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

by Guest Tue Apr 08, 2014 3:13 pm

Shankarsinh Vaghela, who was senior to Modi in the RSS and the BJP, and later became chief minister of Gujarat and one of Modi’s bitter rivals, recalled that even as a young man Narendra chafed at the strictures of the Sangh. “Modi used to miss the morning shakha quite often by sleeping late,” Vaghela said. “He always used to do things differently from others in the group—if all of us wore long-sleeved kurtas, he used to wear short sleeves, and when all of us wore khaki shorts, he wore white shorts. And I remember one day the visiting RSS leader Golwalkar questioning Modi in public for keeping a trimmed beard.”...

The pracharak related an incident that took place during the Emergency: “We in the ABVP were told to organise agitations against the government, from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, and one day we were holding a meeting at the Bhullabhai Char Rasta in Ahmedabad,” he said. “We were supposed to speak against the government, but in a sober tone, because that was the Sangh style, and also the police and the intelligence agencies were watching over us. But while the meeting was on, Narendrabhai passed by on a cycle. He was furious at the composed serenity in our protest. He jumped onto the stage, grabbed the mike and began giving a rabble-rousing speech, spitting abusive words, and not hiding his anger against the government.”

“The audience loved it. But that night, at Hedgewar Bhavan, the senior Sangh leaders scolded Modi for his detrimental and unwarranted act—for a nearly-underground Sangh pracharak to come out in the open. ‘Forget about speaking,’ they lectured him, ‘you shouldn’t have even gone there. Even if the meeting failed, it would be okay, but discipline and obedience to one’s role is superior to all.’”

For all his allegiance to the Sangh and its ideology, the organisation’s structure and style—placing the group above the individual, restraining one’s anger, respecting the protocols established by the leadership—did not mesh with Modi’s personality.....

Modi’s own account of his appointment as chief minister presents the impression that he was surprised, and even humbled, by the unexpected assignment from Vajpayee. In an interview with his official biographer, MV Kamath, Modi said that he was attending a cremation service for a television cameraman when he received a call from Vajpayee requesting a meeting that evening....

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.”

To pre-empt any resistance from the BJP legislators in the state, Modi was accompanied to Gujarat by the former national president, Kushabhau Thakre, and another senior leader, Madan Lal Khurana, whose presence ensured a safe landing for the unelected chief minister. For the RSS, Modi’s installation was a significant accomplishment: for the first time in its history, a fulltime pracharak had become a chief minister.

With state elections due in just over a year, Modi set out to telegraph his ambitious intentions from the moment he landed. “I have come here to play a one-day match,” Modi told the press upon his arrival in Gujarat. “I need fast and performing batsmen to score runs in the limited overs game.” At that point, few could have guessed that Modi’s one-day match would turn into a test series, which is still being played 11 years later.

by Guest Tue Apr 08, 2014 3:17 pm

That same night, Ehsan Jafri, a 72-year-old former MP for Ahmedabad, called his granddaughter Anika in Surat with some disappointing news. Ensconced in his home in Gulburg Society, a mostly Muslim upper-middle class neighbourhood in Ahmedabad, Jafri, a veteran Congress politician, already sensed it would be risky to attempt a journey to Surat the next day. On the phone, he told Anika he wouldn’t be able to come. “But it’s just a shutdown, and he should make it,” she protested to her mother.

At around noon on 28 February, Anika called her grandfather again. “Have you not started?” she asked him. “Beta, the situation is not good here,” Jafri answered. “There are mobs everywhere.” He told her he needed to put the phone down, since he had a lot of calls to make.

A huge mob had already gathered around Gulburg Society, armed with petrol bombs, cycle chains and swords, shouting slogans like “Take revenge and slaughter the Muslims.” Many of Jafri’s neighbours, as well as Muslims from neighbouring slums, had come to his house seeking safety, expecting that his status as a former member of Parliament would afford them protection. “He must have made over a hundred phone calls for help,” Jafri’s wife, Zakia, told me. He called the Gujarat director-general of police, the Ahmedabad police commissioner, the state chief secretary and dozens of others, pleading for their intercession. A witness who survived the carnage later told a court that Jafri even called Narendra Modi: “When I asked him what Modi said, [Jafri] said there was no question of help, instead he got abuses.” Word of Jafri’s frantic calls for help even reached Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani in Delhi: a BJP insider close to Modi, who was with Advani on 28 February, told me that the BJP leader had even called Modi’s office himself to ask about Jafri.

By 2:30 pm, the mobs had broken through the gates of the housing society, and a flood of men converged on Jafri’s home. Women were raped and then burned alive; men were made to shout “Jai Shri Ram”, and then cut to pieces; children were not spared. According to records later submitted in court, Jafri was stripped and paraded naked before the attackers cut off his fingers and legs and dragged his body into a burning pyre. The official police report indicates that 59 people were murdered in Gulburg Society, though independent inquiries put the number at 69 or 70. Jafri’s wife, Zakia, and a few others who had locked themselves in an upstairs room survived.

To this day, Modi maintains that he had no knowledge of the events at Gulburg Society until he was briefed by police officers later that evening. But Sanjiv Bhatt, who was then the state deputy commissioner (Intelligence), says that Modi is lying. (Modi and his administration have vigorously contested Bhatt’s account, as well as the testimony given by several other police and government officials.) Bhatt insists that Modi, who also served as home minister, was in regular contact with the senior police and intelligence leadership throughout the day, and well-informed of events on the ground. Bhatt told me that he spoke with Modi over the phone several times before 2 pm, and reported that a mob had circled Gulburg, and that he met Modi at his office in the afternoon to report that the situation demanded immediate intervention.

“His response was very strange,” Bhatt told me. “He listened and then said, ‘Sanjiv, try to find out if in the past Jafri has been in the habit of opening fire.’”

“Outside the chief minister’s office, in the corridor, I bumped into the former chief minister Amarsinh Choudhary and former home minister Naresh Rawal,” Bhatt continued, referring to two Congress leaders. “Naresh Rawal was my minister earlier, so we talked. They told me Gulburg Ehsanbhai has been giving frantic calls, and they came to meet Modi. I said I had briefed the CM, but you also go and tell him,” Bhatt told me.

“I then got a call on my cellphone from my informer on the site at Gulburg,” Bhatt continued, “telling me that Jafri had opened fire. I was surprised. And when I reached my office, a short report was lying on the table saying Jafri opened fire in self-defence. That was when I realised that this man [Modi] knows things even before I came to know of things.”

by Guest Tue Apr 08, 2014 3:20 pm

When the riots continued unabated, foreign governments began to put pressure on the prime minister’s office, and Vajpayee started grousing. “Modi and Vajpayee had an exasperated relationship,” the BJP insider, who is close to Modi, told me. “Modi had problems with the very Brahmin character of Vajpayee—the high tastes, the poetry. And Vajpayee considered Modi too uncouth.” Vajpayee was convinced Modi would not control the violence, and wanted to remove him. But he knew very well that his own deputy, Advani, and the RSS would forcefully object.

The first man from the moderate camp to challenge Modi was Shanta Kumar, a cabinet minister and former CM of Himachal Pradesh, who said he was “pained and disgusted” by the events in Gujarat. Kumar also demanded action against the VHP and Bajrang Dal, declaring that “those counting votes on dead bodies are not Hindus. Those who think of consolidating Hindutva by shedding blood in Gujarat are the enemies of Hindus.’’...

Among the moderates, there was real concern that the BJP-led coalition government would collapse if any of the secular parties in the alliance withdrew their support. But this argument cut no ice with the Sangh. According to a former BJP national secretary, the powerful RSS leader and former BJP president Kushabhao Thakre spread the word among the party’s other leaders that Modi would have to be defended, even at the cost of the Vajpayee government. “There was lobbying and counterlobbying in the party,” the former BJP secretary recalled. “Ultimately the camp of Thakre, Advani, Modi and Jaitley prevailed over Vajpayee.”

But of the secular regional parties allied with the BJP—including the Janata Dal (United) in Bihar, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu, the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh, and the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal—none walked out of the government. By the time the BJP executive meet began on 12 April 2002, the moderates had already been defeated. Vajpayee had no desire to challenge the strength of the pro-Modi forces, and the moderate prime minister who had wished for Modi’s removal a month earlier now surrendered to the RSS. In his own speech at the Goa executive, Vajpayee took up the flag of the hardliners and spoke in Modi’s language:

“In Indonesia, Malaysia, wherever Muslims are living they don’t want to live in harmony. They don’t mix with the society. They are not interested in living in peace … We don’t need lessons in secularism from anyone. India was secular even before the Muslims and Christians came.”

For perhaps the first time, a prime minister fell in line behind a chief minister—and from that point onwards, Vajpayee lived in fear of Modi. In December 2002, when Modi was campaigning in his first statewide elections, he bluntly told the party that Vajpayee and the other senior leaders should come early in the process, because he did not want anyone else to take credit for his victory by claiming they provided the final push. “So fearful was Vajpayee of Modi,” the BJP insider told me, “when we went for electioneering to Ahmedabad with Arun Jaitley and Uma Bharati, he told us all in the flight, ‘Usually when the prime minister and the leader of the party come to a state, the chief minister would be waiting in anticipation. Here, forget about Modi coming to receive me—my heart is throbbing wondering what the hell Modi will say at the rally.’” Everyone laughed. Vajpayee also laughed, but he was very serious.

by Guest Tue Apr 08, 2014 3:22 pm

In the wake of the 2002 riots, Modi skillfully painted any criticism of his government’s misdeeds as an attack on Gujarat and Gujaratis. Over the past few years, and with considerably more subtlety, he has achieved the same thing with the story of the state’s development miracle. The government has relentlessly provided the media with positive stories of efficient administration, rapid construction and economic growth.

Modi likes to flaunt the fact that Gujarat is a power-excess state, and almost every big-picture story about the “Gujarat miracle”, from Business Today to The Sydney Morning Herald, highlights this fact. But farmers, led by the Sangh’s own farmers’ union, have been protesting for almost a decade that their electricity needs aren’t being met, and government statistics show that the share of power diverted to agriculture has fallen from 43 percent to 21 percent between 2000 and 2010. More than 375,000 farmers are still waiting for electricity connections for their irrigation pumps.

Even the headline figures for Gujarat’s economic expansion in the past decade diminish under closer examination. The state’s GDP growth has only slightly outpaced India as a whole over the past decade. But this is to be expected: Gujarat has long been an industrialised state—and in fact, growth rates under Modi are not significantly higher than they were in the prior two decades. Though Modi has presented Gujarat as the clear leader among Indian states in attracting foreign direct investment, it ranked fourth among states on this measure between 2000 and 2009, and in 2011 fell to sixth place, after Maharashtra, the National Capital Region, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh; Maharashtra has foreign direct investment inflows almost nine times greater than Gujarat.

Data from the Planning Commission, meanwhile, show that in spite of Gujarat’s economic growth, the state lags behind even Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh in rates of poverty reduction. According to the 2011 India Human Development Report, Gujarat also scores poorly in several social indicators, with 44 percent of children under five suffering from malnutrition, worse than Uttar Pradesh.

By themselves, these statistics hardly constitute an indictment of Modi’s record. They merely suggest that his carefully constructed image as an economic miracle-worker has been the result of a well-managed public relations campaign whose false premise is that Gujarat stands head and shoulders above every other Indian state in growth and development—and that anyone who presents data to challenge this narrative is only twisting the truth in order to malign Modi and every Gujarati.

by Sponsored content

Vinod Jose: The Rise of Narendra Modi

Vinod Jose: The Rise of Narendra Modi

Re: Vinod Jose: The Rise of Narendra Modi

Re: Vinod Jose: The Rise of Narendra Modi

Re: Vinod Jose: The Rise of Narendra Modi

Re: Vinod Jose: The Rise of Narendra Modi

Re: Vinod Jose: The Rise of Narendra Modi