Narendra Modi tempers Hindu nationalist message to woo India; Polarising figure has a sense of purpose and ‘rock star appeal’

September 17, 2013 3:19 pm

Narendra Modi tempers Hindu nationalist message to woo India

By Victor Mallet in New Delhi

Polarising figure has a sense of purpose and ‘rock star appeal’

The boast last month by Manmohan Singh, India’s 80-year-old prime minister, about how connected the country had become since he took office a decade ago may come back to haunt the ruling Congress party at the next general election – especially if the claim is true. “In 2004, only 7 per cent of the people had telephone connections,” Mr Singh intoned mechanically as he read out his independence day speech in Hindi from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi. “Today 73 per cent enjoy this facility.” India also had more roads, airports, electricity, schools and – he might have added – televisions.In political terms, the problem for Congress is that the person best placed to take advantage of India’s high-tech revolution is not Mr Singh, who is surely poised to retire, or Rahul Gandhi, the party’s figurehead, butNarendra Modi, who has just been named prime ministerial candidate by the opposition Bharatiya Janata party.

Unlike the amiable but perennially disengaged Mr Gandhi, Mr Modi is an ambitious politician who has already won three elections as chief minister of Gujarat and has been concentrating for more than a year on winning the leadership of the world’s largest democracy.

Mr Modi is undoubtedly controversial. As a Hindu nationalist, he is accused of turning a blind eye to the slaughter of Muslims in communal riots in Gujarat back in 2002 (though he denies responsibility). Congress party leaders hope that by having him as their candidate, the BJP will alienate India’s Muslim and secular voters.

But it may not be that easy. As one of India’s most practised orators in Hindi, Mr Modi can not only hold a crowd in thrall at a mass rally but also impress television audiences nationwide. He and his campaign staff are adept users of Twitter, and have pioneered the exploitation in India of holographic images, allowing him to make virtual appearances at several locations simultaneously.

Even if these are mere high-tech party tricks irrelevant to villagers without power or running water, there is no denying that the BJP’s popularity has risen in the densely populated states of north India thanks in part to what Swapan Dasgupta, a political commentator for The Indian Express, calls Modi’s “rock star appeal” among the young.

Mr Dasgupta suggests that Mr Modi’s enemies – like the erstwhile rivals of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK – underestimate the popular appeal of a rising national politician simply because they dislike him so much and see him as a polarising figure.

Mr Modi, meanwhile, is already tailoring his message to the needs of a national electorate and seeking to emulate his BJP predecessor Atal Behari Vajpayee, who made peace with Islamic Pakistan and become one of India’s most successful prime ministers.

It could be argued that the telegenic Mr Modi’s supporters will be too thinly spread to win many parliamentary seats for the BJP in a first-past-the-post system where local politicians deploy ethnic, religious or caste-based “vote banks” to secure their constituencies – although a counter-argument is that in India the group labelled “Hindus” form the biggest vote bank of all.

Mr Modi himself, significantly, hardly talks about religion at all these days. Instead, he focuses on his economic record and the need for good governance (prompting enthusiastic applause from the middle-class students of Delhi).

Congress remains a formidable political machine, and expects to be rewarded at the polls for enlarging a costly food subsidy system that is supposed to provide an extraordinary 810m people – two-thirds of the population – with cheap grain.

Even so, Mr Modi’s biggest advantages in the election to be held by May next year are the failures of the incumbent Congress government, which has presided over a halving of economic growth to below 5 per cent a year, high inflation and a recent collapse of the rupee.

Mr Modi is distrusted by some, hated even, for his role in the 2002 riots. But he is not known to be corrupt, unlike so many other Indian politicians. And as one who sold tea from a railway station stall as a child, he did not rise to the top like Mr Gandhi simply because he is the scion of a famous political family.

If he does succeed in becoming prime minister, it will be because he has what Mr Gandhi and most other Congress leaders noticeably lack: a sense of purpose.