From: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol - XLVIII No. 16, April 20, 2013
Editorial
Selling Modi
A well-organised public relations campaign to whitewash Narendra Modi of his multiple sins is on.
In the aftermath of Narendra Modi’s third consecutive victory in the Gujarat assembly elections in December last year, a concerted campaign has been launched to project him as the prime-ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the coming general elections. This was already on the cards well before the Gujarat elections and, in the four months since, it is apparent that his projection is a well-organised affair, much bigger than the larger-than-life persona that it is trying to project for Modi.
Soon after the organised killings of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 helped Narendra Modi win the assembly election that year, which the BJP was expecting to lose prior to the riots, there was a sudden and perceptible change in the way he projected himself. Aggressive Hindutva was put on the public relations back-burner and those who insisted on the continued focus on Hindutva – like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Pravin Togadia and influential sections of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – were unceremoniously sidelined. This is not to suggest that Modi abandoned aggressive Hindutva, but it was to remain invisible, at least below the radar of public perception and mainstream media. An organised publicity campaign was launched to foreground “development” which mainly referred to easing the terms of business even further for private capital as well as a few large-scale infrastructure projects with high propaganda value, like the filling of Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati riverfront with water stolen from the Narmada.
Those who have followed the economic, social and political reports on Gujarat will be well aware of the hollowness of the claims of development that Modi makes about his government. The human development indicators remain low while bare economic growth has not shown any change in long-term trajectories. On the other hand, Gujarat under the BJP has become the third-most indebted state of the country and the concessions given to private capital are already coming back to undermine the state’s fragile ecology as well as its fiscal position. Moreover, the communal polarisation built over decades of ground-level work by the RSS and its affiliates and cemented by the 2002 killings remains untouched, with Muslims living in ghettos and facing constant discrimination. Whether it was during the Bhuj earthquake at the beginning of this century or the drought this year, reports from the ground indicate that even relief measures and access to water remain sorely communalised, with Muslims, dalits and tribals facing discrimination.
Given such ground conditions, it is admirable how much Modi’s public relations exercise has achieved for its paymaster. APCO Worldwide, a United States-based public relations agency, has been handling Modi’s public relations since August 2007. It is mandated to project Gujarat as an investment destination and also raise the profile of its chief minister, both in international and domestic arenas. The shepherding of India’s top business magnates for some years now to endorse Modi as India’s prime minister can perhaps be attributed to this PR agency which manages the public relations of the tobacco and health insurance industries in the US, governments like Israel and Kazakhstan, and international bodies like the United Nations, World Bank and Association of Southeast Asian Nations. One of APCO’s strengths is to create fake “citizens’ campaigns” on public issues like health and environmental concerns through artificially-created organisations to push the agenda of its clients. Those familiar with APCO’s work find its fingerprints in the public relations blitzkrieg, particularly on social media and mainstream media, which has been accompanying Modi for the past few years.
What has been the main purpose of this sustained PR exercise? It is apparent that this was to project Narendra Modi as the undisputed leader of the opposition to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government for the 2014 general elections. In this the campaign has been successful. It has managed to overcome the immediate obstacles – within the RSS’ family and the existing and potential allies – to pose a stark choice to India’s political class: those against the Congress have to be prepared to deal with Modi or risk political irrelevance in the post-2014 Lok Sabha.
What has been the main message of Modi’s PR campaign? Behind all the carefully outlined speeches and choreographed performances, Modi is telling India’s dominant classes – industrialists, urban professionals and the rural rich – that he can successfully overcome the obstacles to higher economic growth, itself a code word for faster circulation of capital and higher returns on investments, by “managing” democracy as he has done in Gujarat through a combination of communal terror and sops to some sections. Modi’s promise is that he will do this much better than what the Congress has managed to do in the past decade.
There is no doubt that Modi’s public relations exercise has been a great success in the past six years. His message has been warmly welcomed by the assorted “captains” of industry, opinion “makers”, “journalists”, “experts”, and sundry other self-important folk. It also goes without saying that this success is based on communal prejudices which are widespread and on ideas of “development” which are equally anti-people and dangerous. Yet, winning the PR battle among the brash and the beautiful may not be enough to become prime minister. India’s democratic traditions remain robust; popular movements remain strong despite repression and secular traditions remain vigorous. These will continue to resist Modi’s rise and remain impervious to APCO’s charms. The weak link remains India’s political parties who have been so compromised with corruption and hypocrisy that they often do not represent a worthwhile alternative to the citizen.
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