Modi 2.0: Beyond the Ordinary

By Sunil Sharan

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been known to be critical about India's policies in Kashmir. But when on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's birthday in 2020, Merkel sent him a note wishing him with the words Liebe Narendra (Dear Narendra), written in hand, one knew that Modi had arrived on the world stage. Modi 2.0: Beyond the Ordinary is an objective analysis of the prime minister, his struggles and achievements, his spiritual journey, the men and the women in his life, and his friends and enemies. It also doesn't shy away from discussing the difficult questions surrounding Modi-Godhra and his relations with India's Muslims.

Self-confessedly, author Sunil Sharan was once critical of Narendra Modi but after carefully observing him for years, he realised that Modi is indeed a transformational man. Today, India stands rejuvenated, its prestige around the world high, the spirit of its people uplifted.

Once the question used to be: Who after Nehru? Now the question is: Who after Modi? Modi 2.0 debates the possibilities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Apr 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9789389449754

Sunil Sharan

Sunil Sharan is the author of Lockdown: India Under Siege from Corona (2020) and Modi 2.0: Beyond the Ordinary (2021).

Book preview

MODI 2.0

MODI 2.0

Beyond the Ordinary

Sunil Sharan

BLOOMSBURY INDIA

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First published in India 2021

This edition published 2021

Copyright © Sunil Sharan, 2021

Sunil Sharan has asserted his right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as the author of this work

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ISBN: PB: 978-93-89449-73-0; e-Book: 978-93-89449-75-4

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CONTENTS

Introduction

1Modi’s Mettle

2Modi and the Media

3Modi and Muslims

4Modi’s Foreign Policy

5All the Women in the PM’s Orbit

6All the PM’s Men

7The PM and His Opponents

8Friends of the PM

9From Sanyasi to Statesman: The PM’s Spiritual Journey

10Godhra

11Why Modi Won in 2019

12What the PM Achieved in Gujarat

13The PM and the Military

14Who after Modi?

15What to Expect from Modi 2.0

16In Conclusion

17Afterword—Modi and the Pandemic

About the Author

Introduction

Iam the least likely person to write a positive biography of the prime minister of India—Narendra Damodardas Modi. My father was an officer in the Indian Army. He came from a family in Old Delhi that had traditionally always voted for the Congress. My father attended a few sessions of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS—the National Volunteers’ Front) in his youth and was turned off by the ‘soochna aiee hai’¹ (the diktat of the day has come). My father did not like the dictatorial nature of the daily diktat, and that it had to be rigidly followed by all. Hence, it was going to be the Congress for him.

My father told me that he favoured Indira Gandhi because he believed that she funded the Indian Armed Forces adequately. I did my schooling all over India, mostly in convent schools, and completed my high school from a public school in Delhi. I took to reading a lot of political magazines in high school, including India Today, The Illustrated Weekly of India, Sunday and, of course, the daily paper that we received at home.

In my senior years in high school, around 1983, I became a rabid opponent of Indira Gandhi. There were growing agitations in Assam and Punjab. Indira Gandhi took a strong approach to both the agitations, in Assam² and Punjab.³ Her policies in Assam, and subsequently in Punjab, grated on me. Even though we were a military family, my parents allowed a free and frank exchange of political views at the dinner table.

My best friend in 12th grade was a Sikh boy named Bikramjit Singh Rishi. Around 11 a.m. on 31 October 1984, he broke the news of Indira Gandhi’s assassination to our entire class. I was distraught because the following day was my birthday, and I knew that all the celebrations would be cancelled. My father had retired from the Army by then, but on that day, he wore his old Army uniform as a mark of respect to the fallen prime minister.

Delhi burnt, and it burnt. I was profoundly affected. My mother was from Punjab. I thought that time would heal all wounds. The previous years had been tumultuous for India when the Hindus were massacred en masse in Punjab by the Sikh militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. And then, the Golden Temple burnt.

I, like many of my generation, was captivated by Rajiv Gandhi. He would change everything. There was hope everywhere. But by 1987, Rajiv had become embroiled in the scandal of the Bofors scam.⁴ I started criticising him intensely at home. Vishwanath Pratap Singh, popularly known as V.P. Singh, was the new messiah, though Indian politics still remained dominated by the Congress.

I went to the US in 1990 for graduate studies. I remember reading a headline about Lal Krishna Advani there in The New York Times—‘A Hindu Nationalist Shakes and Stirs India’. It was a reference to his Rath Yatra. And then, Rajiv Gandhi was brutally assassinated. I returned to India. My extended family, still Congress supporters, were searching for a leader. Madhavrao Scindia’s name was mentioned. India always seemed to look up to people of lineage. Fortunately, the crown went to Narasimha Rao.

And then came the fateful day in December 1992 when the Babri Masjid came crashing down. At that time, at work, my boss was a Sikh. He asked me what right did the people have to demolish other people’s places of worship. He was, of course, also referring to what had happened to the Golden Temple a few years earlier. I felt acutely embarrassed and did not know what to say to him.

I was not going to switch to the RSS’s side as yet. In fact, I became politically rudderless. Then, Atal Bihari Vajpayee emerged. I was taken in by his masterful oratory. He had been painted by the national and international media as the right man in the wrong party. But then, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fell to the internal struggle between Vajpayee and Advani.⁵,⁶

I remember exactly where I was when the news about Godhra broke. I was in my car, at a particular crossing, in the Silicon Valley. The radio bulletin talked about a pregnant Muslim woman’s womb being pierced by a Hindu mob wielding a sword and the foetus being plucked out.⁷ My stomach churned. I started detesting Modi who was then the chief minister of Gujarat.

Many years later, I remember reading a book, The Rape of Nanking, published in 1997 by Basic Books. The author, Iris Chang, writes that not even pregnant women were spared and that after gang rape, Japanese soldiers ‘sometimes slashed open the bellies of pregnant women and ripped out the fetuses for amusement’.⁸ I also learnt that this was a routine practice for American GIs stationed in Germany to indulge in such atrocities with pregnant German women in the aftermath of the Second World War.

I moved back to the US in 1996 to attend university and then work in the private sector. That was a time when India was still considered an economic backwater⁹; ‘Chindia’ had not been coined yet¹⁰ and the NRIs were still respected, even envied, in India.¹¹ The Internet had made news from India readily accessible to the NRIs. Still, the India we identified the most with and craved the most news from was the India of the Bollywood stars.

Internet bandwidths only increased much later to support video streaming of news. Thus, I lost a good part of what was happening in India until the mid-2000s. Actually, I was happy not to be in touch with my motherland. News was rarely good from there, and the US seemed to offer endless possibilities.

With video streaming coming in vogue later, my initial experience of NDTV left me impressed. The news channel was founded by the articulate psephologist Prannoy Roy, whose offices in Delhi I had visited earlier in 1990. The coverage of Kargil in 1999 got me hooked on Barkha Dutt. I missed the early innings of Arnab Goswami and Rajdeep Sardesai though. Overall, NDTV seemed to disseminate news the way I preferred it.

India was unabashedly secular as far as I was concerned. This seemed to be true for NDTV too. I often thought that the Hindus were the culprit, and NDTV was seen by some as anti-Hindu.¹² And then Godhra happened. I didn’t watch any of its coverage because I was too busy applying to MBA schools, however, I started despising Narendra Modi.

In 2010, I started writing articles for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. I wrote a couple of virulently anti-Modi articles. My consumption of Indian news was mostly from the left-wing, secular media brigade. I was fine with it. I knew of no biases in Indian media then. Then I got my first taste of prejudice in media. Dawn abruptly stopped publishing my articles. They said there were too many Indians writing for them. I was crushed. They said that they had three columnists from India already. But they were all Indian Muslims. I kept writing for the American papers, always making sure that I toed the strict, secular line that I had been brought up on.

I knew that both the Hindus and Sikhs had suffered in the 1980s. I came across an interview by Arun Shourie who appeared to nod in agreement with his interviewer that said that by 1984, minorities in India had started looking at the Hindu male as weak.¹³ I recall reading Shourie’s cover story on the Nellie massacre, published in India Today, in the early 1980s, when I was in my very early teens.¹⁴ So here was a man who had reported on Nellie and had stated then that if Hindus didn’t stop turning on minorities, one day, they would begin turning on one another. And here he was now, in 2012 or thereabouts, espousing the Hindu cause.¹⁵ What had made such a man like him rethink? Did I need to do a rejig of my own cranium?

The Congress won in 2009, plunging the BJP in deep despair. After some years, I got in touch with an Indian Internet entrepreneur who wanted me to support Narendra Modi’s campaign for 2014. It was not going to happen from my side. And then this entrepreneur was full of himself. He delegated me to his second-in-command, who promptly dashed any hope that I might have had because he felt that I was encroaching on his turf. I thought Modi and his people were all the same. So the chance went abegging. I was in India when the 1984 riots happened, and I was well out of the country when Godhra occurred, but now Modi was etched in my memory as someone who was against minorities.

In the meantime, the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) second term had run its course. Hubris had done the Congress in. It had become synonymous with corruption. I refused to believe that Sonia Gandhi herself was corrupt, but those in her inner circle had been accused of corruption. However, by this time, the Congress appeared to be ideologically bankrupt.¹⁶ Further, it seemed that only a few leaders in the party, apart from the Gandhis, could win a Lok Sabha seat on their own merit. There were no state leaders of any consequence. Even the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was humiliated; for instance, in 2013, Rahul Gandhi tore up a government ordinance in public because he felt that it was shielding corrupt politicians.¹⁷ Why didn’t Manmohan Singh resign instead of continuing in his chair? Clearly, the final power didn’t lie with him as the prime minister.¹⁸

To my chagrin, a phoenix was rising in the west from the ashes of Godhra. He was putting in place all the building blocks for his run for the highest office in 2014.¹⁹ I was fervent. He must be stopped somehow. The Supreme Court constituted a special investigation team (SIT) to investigate his supposed wrongdoings. Hah! Now he’ll meet his fate. But the SIT cleared him. How could that be? The highest judiciary in India was fiercely independent; so, perhaps, the man was not guilty after all. But I was still not convinced about his innocence. Hopefully, his challengers within the BJP would trip him. But they didn’t stand a chance. The Sanghi cadre went out in their support for him.²⁰ And then he won in 2014. Handsomely. I reconciled myself to his prime ministership, although I still did not write anything much in support of him and kept watching NDTV, which, by then, included Nidhi Razdan.

And then I heard that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE had conferred their highest awards on him. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are both bastions of Sunni conservatism. Many Sunni Muslims of India have migrated there and look up to these two countries. Sure, they provide oil and gas to India, but India could get those from any other country; for example, Iran and Russia. And sure, many Indians went to work as export labour in large quantities to these countries, but that was no reason for them to honour India’s Narendra Modi. Surely, they had their folks in India who told them what was true on the ground.²¹ I still was not impressed by the World Yoga Day seeing it as a propaganda and ‘hugplomacy’ as a sham, especially that ungainly pirouette with Francois Hollande of France.

Then came the 2019 general elections. The Goods and Services Tax (GST) and demonetisation would do Modi in, I prayed. I covered the elections constantly hoping that he would lose but felt otherwise. The man was going to win. Akshay Kumar held an interview with him. The very same Mamata Banerjee, who was so sharply critical about him, sent him hand-picked kurtas.²² And then, Rahul Gandhi droned on and on about ‘chowkidar chor hai’.²³

I wrote in a major newspaper, counselling him not to do so. It was tasteless; it was untrue. I adored Priyanka. But what was she doing there encouraging poor kids to call the PM a chor?²⁴ The prime minister remained silent on the chor barbs. I started wondering—this man has taken so much abuse all his life, but he maintains a steely exterior almost all the time. If he says anything marginally out of the ordinary, it is pounced upon. And then, the PM went off to Kedarnath. By now, I would write both pro-Hindu as well as anti-Hindu views in my columns. No community, or country even, was sacred in my opinion. If one