Narendra Modi: A Political Biography

369 Pages·2015·3.08 MB·English

by  Andy Marino

NARENDRA MODI
A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY
Andy Marino
HarperCollins Publishers India
For my parents
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Prologue
P 1: Beginnings
ART
1. The Early Years
2. On the Road
3 Political Awakening
P 2: The Ascent
ART
4. Learning the Ropes
5. The Yatra to Power
6. Rising to Responsibility
P 3: The Return
ART
7. The Riots
8. Fighting for Gujarat
9. Development and Governance
P 4: The Future
ART
10. And Now, Prime Minister?
Notes and References
Index
Acknowledgements
Photographic Insert
About the Author
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
THIS IS THE STORY of an extraordinary life.
As always there is a context: Narendra Modi is the prime ministerial candidate of
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in what is likely to be a historic general election.
The 2014 Lok Sabha poll will set the course for Indian politics and policy well into
the next decade. It could be the most dramatic and important election since March
1977, when Indira Gandhi was defeated after revoking the Emergency. The
Emergency ended before most Indians alive today were born. Today over 60 per cent
of Indians are under thirty-five years of age. This election will belong to young India
and that is why, despite rising disenchantment with politics and politicians, voters are
energized by the prospect of change.
When I began working on this book, the compelling nature of the subject struck
me: Narendra Modi is both a complex and simple man, but within a multilayered
persona. He can be decisive, firm, unyielding. And yet he has a calm about him that
enables him to surmount crises with dispassionate meticulousness, even detachment.
I travelled with him on his campaign rallies, interviewed him over several weeks and
observed him closely as he went about his work.
Though gregarious in private, Modi hasn’t granted interviews often. Where he has,
they have been short and pointed. Our conversations, however, were open-ended and
went back and forth over his life and work. It is possibly the first time he has granted
such access to any journalist or author, Indian or foreign.
In the voluminous recorded conversations we had, he revealed for the first time
details about his early life and the most controversial period in his political career: the
communal riots in Gujarat in 2002.
Modi spoke with candour, without notes. Nothing, in terms of questions, was
taboo. We spoke in English in which he is increasingly fluent. The obvious misgivings
readers may have though are: one, how well can a British author decode the
complexities of India? And two, would this book end up as an attempt to airbrush
Modi’s faults and play up his strengths?
To answer the first question: sometimes an outsider’s perspective can shed clarity
on events that those too close to them, out of passion or prejudice, might miss. Having
worked in India, I am familiar with Indian politics without being swayed by a
particular ideology or point of view.
As for the second misgiving: my account of Modi’s life is based on extensive
research over almost a year and interviews with a range of people, in politics and
outside it, for Modi and against Modi, and this has enabled me to assess his work and
life with cold objectivity.
No biography carries credibility if it is mere hagiography. Having written two
biographies, published by leading publishers in Britain and the United States, it was
important for me to get the tone and balance of this book absolutely right. For this
reason too, footnotes and references have been meticulously catalogued for each
chapter at the end of this volume.
And yet objectivity does not mean flying in the face of incontrovertible evidence.
Modi has been the subject of the longest, most intense – and probably the most
vituperative – campaign of vilification since the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat.
In recent months, after he was anointed the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate
Modi’s development record in Gujarat too has come under close scrutiny. Allegations
that he is authoritarian, runs a surveillance-based state, is prone to making factual
errors in his campaign speeches and has no alternative vision for India have been made
by both his political opponents and the media.
I have carefully examined every one of these – and several more – to get at the facts
and separate them from the fiction.
Modi deserves a narrative that is balanced, objective and fair – but also unsparingly
critical of his foibles. I hope this book meets that high standard.
PROLOGUE
WE DROVE TO THE helipad along closed-off roads. In front went the jammer, with
its domed electronics bolted to the roof. The eight silver SUVs, following two or
three abreast, were packed with soldiers and black-clad commandos of Narendra
Modi’s Z-Plus security detail, the highest level the Indian government offers its VIPs.1
They were there with good reason. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI),
tireless in its efforts to wage a proxy war on India, had stepped up its attacks since
Modi began his nationwide election campaign. The ISI trains terror cells and sends
infiltrators into India, usually via Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). It smuggles arms and
explosives over the border into Gujarat. The porous, poorly policed Nepal border with
Bihar is another conduit.
Narendra Modi, as Gujarat’s chief minister, has been target number one of the ISI-
financed terror network known as the Indian Mujahideen.2 At rallies across India,
Modi has drawn crowds in lakhs and the danger of a suicide bomber is ever present.
During his twelve years as chief minister, he has been firm in his resistance to
incursions and terror plots. Pakistan’s civilian leadership has recently said it ‘can work’
with Modi as prime minister but the threat to his life from a proxy terror attack
remains palpable.
As our convoy sped along, soldiers and police were placed every 100 metres on the
roadside with their backs towards us, looking for suspicious movements in the
undergrowth and down the wide avenues. On arrival at the helipad the commandos
leaped from the cars and sprinted towards the chopper while soldiers in khaki fanned
out, machine guns at the ready, to provide a wider ring of cover. It was only when we
were in the air that the vulnerability would be replaced by the relative safety of the
skies. Then there would be only Modi, a couple of senior assistants and me in the
passenger compartment, with the pilot and co-pilot up front. No commandos on
board.
An aroma of unburned fuel from the helicopter’s exhausts leaked into the cabin as
the rotors spun faster. I leant across to make myself heard to Modi. The pitch of the
rotors had changed to a tighter, more aggressive note and we rose smoothly into the air
while rotating to face west. A smile broke across his face: ‘You’ll love it,’ he said, above
the engine noise, speaking about the rally he would shortly address and our interaction
with the crowd. ‘It will be the best.’ The chopper’s nose dipped and the craft surged
forward.
There had been rain overnight. A mist hung below the cloud cover, restricting
visibility to around 10 kilometres at our height of 1,500 feet. As we raced over towns
and villages, vegetation was everywhere in shades of dark chrome and cobalt green.
The rectangular grid of streets and buildings arose straight and cube-cut from
entangling foliage, flat grey concrete roofs glistening grimy and rain-streaked, as if they
were relics of an ancient civilization.
Modi sat quietly peering over his spectacles as we flew along, a big man in a small
cabin. He mulled over a few handwritten notes, facts and figures, for the speech he was
going to deliver. After that he skimmed through some articles culled for him from the
previous day’s newspapers. Outside, the sky brightened slightly as we headed south,
the villages below now showing pitched, red-tiled roofs. More temples flashed up at us
in the brightening morning light.
The fields were still green but the topsoil shallower, the vegetation lighter and
sparser as the ground became rockier and showed more outcrops and escarpments,
heading towards the wide littoral of the Arabian Sea.
Modi’s critics allege that Gujarat’s transformation is nothing but a grand illusion,
smoke and mirrors, and that in truth the state is in a terrible mess, a cauldron of
poverty and religious bigotry just as it was before Modi took over. Alongside the
endless controversies about Modi’s personality, his disputed success in Gujarat is one
of the dominating themes of the 2014 general election.
For anybody writing the story of Narendra Modi’s political career, the chronology
is compelling. His tenure as chief minister of Gujarat more than encompasses the
Congress party’s latest, almost decade-long rule of India. The tantalizing possibility is
that they both might now end if Modi becomes prime minister in May 2014.
Modi was appointed by his national party as chief minister of Gujarat in October
2001. (He was not at first elected.) Astonishingly, it was his first-ever political tenure.
Till then he had only held administrative party positions. He was a back-room worker
and strategist for the BJP, rising to become its general secretary, but he had never stood
for public office.
Only a few months into his new job, Gujarat was plunged into bloody communal
riots. The state suffered murderous clashes between Hindus and Muslims in February
and March 2002. Ever since, Modi has widely been held responsible. His most virulent
opponents claim he planned and orchestrated the riots, which resulted in the deaths of
790 Muslims and 254 Hindus, with 223 people missing. The United States denied
him a visa in 2005 on that basis and despite this diplomatic affront to India, owing to
Modi’s position as an elected state chief minister, the Congress-led UPA government
raised only the very mildest of formal objections.
The Gujarat riots of 2002 set in stone the image of Modi. Until very recently that
view, largely unchallenged, had not changed significantly. In the meantime, Modi was
re-elected as Gujarat’s chief minister thrice. The BJP’s majority in Gujarat was almost
as large as it had been when he was first elected in late 2002. In the December 2012
assembly election, it is believed that over a quarter of the state’s Muslims voted for
him. But the angst remains.
As our chopper came in to land, crowds surged forward below us and a line of security
men spread their arms in an attempt to hold them back. When the cabin door opened,
the air outside had turned quite pink and I was briefly startled by it until crackling
noises everywhere revealed clouds of gunpowder smoke from firecrackers, almost
invisible in the daylight. The cordite smell reminded one of the real danger of
gunpowder in the Hindi heartland of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Again there were the commandos and soldiers, a separate detachment sent on
ahead to meet us, and again we loaded ourselves into a convoy of cars and SUVs. Now
we passed along decorated, celebratory streets full of balloons and bunting, lined, it
seemed, with nearly half the population of the town.
At the rally, filled with heaving crowds, Modi spoke without notes and without a
teleprompter. I noticed that no word was stumbled over or swallowed, and how first
one arm and then the other would be slowly raised to emphasize a point before
returning to rest. It gave an impression of both relaxation and strength. At all his
campaign rallies, Modi uses his body language to add force to his oratory. His voice
rises and falls several pitches as he tears into the Congress and other parties. The
cadence and tonality is quite unique – rarely seen in India or indeed even in the West