It’s all about the messaging

In simple terms – it’s all in the messaging and how deep down it has percolated. Narendra Modi loves the term ‘last mile connectivity’. And he has assiduously promoted that. And it’s the simple things like DBT, toilets, roads, water, housing, mobiles, and basic healthcare. If Modi has managed to take those benefits and the messaging his government have been talking about, to the last man, he has little to worry about.
I remember an election in the South during Indira’s time all of us thought she would lose, which she ended up winning. When journalists asked the people who they voted for and why, the answer was simple and uncomplicated: ‘Indramma’. It wasn’t the candidate or the party. The poor villager only identified her with the vote because she was was the face. And this was when very little of the basic services had reached the poorest villager.
In ten years, has Modi changed that? I think he has – at a frenetic pace. And he has shown time and again that he has no time or patience for slackers. It’s for the government and the party PR machinery to continue to reach out and do the rest. How well all of that counters the Congress narrative of ‘intolerance’ and ‘bigotry’ in each state and district is what will matter in the end. Because that is where the Congress and Opposition is going to hit them hard in the next 10 months. They have nothing else to take on the government with. And the government and the party need to confront that head-on.
You can sneer at his Mann ki Baat but what it has done is taken Modi’s messaging right down to the last man. He might claim it’s not political but who’s he kidding? Imagine the prime minister of the country calling up someone in a small town about debating something no one had heard of. And the whole country is listening. He has used the ubiquitous radio to reach the last man while we were squabbling on social media and thinking we were Tees Maar Khans.
I am only afraid of one thing – the MPs who owe their seat to Modi seem to have become complacent and arrogant. Not all, but there are many who believe winning their seat is his problem, not theirs. He keeps warning them that they need to work in their constituencies but how many do?
Just making a comment in favour of Modi or his policies on social media arent going to win a politician an election. For that he/she needs to roll up their sleeves and get to work.
Verbal wars on social media are also not going to win elections, whatever the Left-Liberal or the Right might think. Even they need to understand that abusing and trolling, often personal and vicious, isn’t really helping the cause.

Glad to see the new ruthless BJP. Hope it lasts.

I, for one, am glad to see the new BJP. They have to win 2024 at any cost, and to hell with social niceties. I hope this isn’t an aberration.

You can be politically correct, ethical and moral when the people on the other side display similar qualities. By now, it’s pretty clear those ranged against the BJP have no such sterling qualities.

I’m glad the BJP has finally overcome that psychological hurdle that it is not sacrificing its core political ideology, even as it bends its own rules of being a party with a difference to beat the Opposition at its game.

This Opposition that accuses the BJP constantly of being a washing machine, in effect, collectively runs the largest political laundromat in the world. And there are innumerable examples. Take Arvind Kejriwal. Since he entered politics, his political life has been a litany of broken promises. There is not one politician left who he has not accused of corruption and threatened to lock up. But has he? Even one?

And yet, for political expediency, he has hugged and shaken hands with all of them. He might wear the same shirt, but I am sure it goes to the laundry every other day, like his political beliefs. He’s the new Mr. Clean.

Then there’s Nitish Kumar, who runs his own laundry service that whitewashes his political ideology as he swings from right-wing to secular left-liberal at his convenience. Do you want me to mention the Yadav families of Bihar and UP? I don’t think so. The one in Bihar is preparing to spend some quality time in jail, again.

Look at the Communists who claim they have no religious ideology but send their atheist thoughts to the cleaners when they want to support parties that believe in a hardcore religious doctrine.

And finally, there’s the Congress. What do you say about India’s oldest political party?

They are the last people to lecture the BJP on political morality. From strong-arming a President to sign an Emergency proclamation to having another who was ready to sweep the floor for one of their kids, to have ‘committed’ judges, to have a battery of lawyers prepared to save their first family from corruption cases…the acts of malfeasance indulged in by the Congress are too many to mention here.

Its leaders can abuse right-wing parties, the RSS and its ideologues and then quickly slip into a dhoti, spread Vibhuti on their foreheads and fall at the feet of any God or Goddess before an election. The next day wearing skull caps, they can support politicians who hate cows enough to eat them and, with a straight face, say only they can ‘save’ the Minorities from the BJP.

Rahul Gandhi goes abroad and cavorts with all those actively engaged in anti-India activities. Then, even before he returns, his faithful advisors run his views and the dubious company he keeps through the party laundromat, and they all vanish from sight! And the 53-year-old Boy Wonder is back to showing his dimples.

And the latest circus to hit town is the Patriotic Democratic Alliance (PDA), who all run their private laundry services. Although, one of them suffered a setback just a day before when the workers at its dry cleaning service revolted. They’re having some managerial issues. Let’s see when they reopen under new management!

Kaam chalu aahey.

Time to leave, Rahul

I say this as a former long-time Congress supporter/voter. Feel free to correct me, but I don’t believe that in 18 years as MP, Rahul Gandhi has given even one sensible, well-meaning, and crucial suggestion to the govt in power on any issue. All he has done is whine, complain and exaggerate. And the issues he has raised in parliament have usually been overshadowed by the blunders he makes while speaking. And when he’s not doing all of that, he’s holidaying.

Many of us then felt that if Rahul had to take over the reins of the country someday, he needed to understand how to run a state machinery. Becoming chief minister of a Congress-ruled state would be the perfect place to start. But the reason given against that was that Rajiv Gandhi also had no administrative experience when he took over.

The truth is Rajiv took over at a difficult time for India. Most Indians born after 1950 had never experienced the trauma of an assassination. Indira’s death affected the country deeply. For whatever reason, the Congress party decided to impose the son on us. The country was too shocked to comprehend then. It was just relieved to see the young man step up and accept the responsibility.

But as events proved, the Rajiv Gandhi charisma unravelled pretty fast. Rahul had no such encumbrances. On the contrary, he has had the collective experience of senior Congressmen and women around him from a 100-plus-year-old party, whom he could observe closely and learn. He could have studied the political nuances and the nitty-gritty of running a party and country. But he didn’t. He didn’t think he needed to understand governance for that.

He believed, and his fawning courtiers around him have made him think to date in the illusion that he is anointed to lead, first the party and then the country, because he is a member of the dynasty that ruled India the longest. And that probably would have happened if one Narendra Damodardas Modi hadn’t decided to storm the citadel, which was the preserve of the Congress and its well-cultivated ecosystem.

It has been eight years, and the Modi wave shows no signs of abating. The BJP has stated that it is no longer willing to play second fiddle. BJP has stamped its presence, and Modi has become this larger-than-life persona domestically and globally, who isn’t an aberration like the Gujrals, Deve Gowdas, Charan Singhs and Chandra Shekhars of the world. Or even a full-term PM Vajpayee. He’s here to stay. And neither the 137-year-old Congress party nor the dynasty that straddled it for decades can do anything to stop him.

But even as Rahul’s ardent admirers (yes, he still has many) have been drumming it into us since 2004 that he’s a better choice than Modi, he has been found wanting in every box where you want to tick ✔️ you can only tick X — Political acumen, commitment, long-term stability… you name it. He’s failed everywhere. Listen to his speeches and stage-managed interviews. They are bereft of facts, figures and substance.

Even in parliament, he has come across as a politician who is more interested in having fun than engaging in serious debate with facts and figures. More often than not, he ends up looking like a joke. In politics, it is not enough to be a nice guy, which I am sure he is. But, as pictures have proved, he comes across as a personable, affectionate man. But is that enough to beat a ruthless Modi or anyone else who comes after him? BJP has shown that it is here to stay, and the majority (no pun) would rather have them and Modi in power than Congress.

Can this Rahul Gandhi change that?

Does the Govt really understand what the youth want?

I met a couple of 21-year-olds last week. Let’s call them A and D. They were apprehensive about their names being revealed because they were in their final year in college and did not want any issue cropping up with the authorities. We were discussing the youth, their choices and their political views.

One of them, A, bluntly told me, “Every time a person from your generation scoffs at a millennial for being impatient they conveniently choose to ignore the facts staring them in the face. It is your generation that is destroying this world. Keep in mind, yours is the generation that set West Asia on fire, tanked the global economy and ignored a dying climate that will affect us – the millennial – not you, because you will probably be dead and gone by then.”

While I was still recovering from that, he said, the problem with the coverage of youth issues is that a bunch of 40+plus-year-olds is making decisions about what the youth want. “Take education. For all talk of reforms in the past 10 years, public education is sub-standard and private education is still not affordable. I don’t say this with smugness but with sorrow because I am a product of the same public education system. Having almost completed my graduation, I consider myself a survivor because nothing stifles a child’s creativity more than an SSC board education. When I visit my alma mater my teachers tell me, they would not ask the children to study in public schools like this one, so poor is the quality of education there now.”

He said he was fortunate that his parents had the resources for him to engage in private undergraduate education but there were so many of his classmates who wanted to be engineers and doctors who scored just as much as he did but could not get into a medical or engineering college because of reservations and just could not afford a private college. So they ended up doing BCom or BSc and are now working at a call centre. There are always exceptions such as Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and APJ Abdul Kalam to this rule, but the system still puts its products at a disadvantage, he said ruefully.

“So, when we take these issues up with our elders they either point to some opinion polls and surveys on paper that reinforces the notion they already disbelieve or they dismissively ask us “why don’t you do something to change it?’ The answer to that is simple. It is not my job yet. It is the job of today’s ruling classes,” he said bluntly.

He said, however, that many of his friends actually would not mind still voting for the BJP but there are a few things that stick in their throat – one is the incessant need of the government to be the moral police in the country. “Look at the way goons attempt to disrupt a rock show or Valentine’s Day or Sunburn Festival. Or, when hooligans and vigilantes intimidate and thrash college-going couples because they are holding hands. I don’t claim they are state-sanctioned but it is obvious who they are. What gives them the right? And I am not objecting to the police stopping under-age drinking or drunk driving. That should be stopped along with the rampant use of drugs on campuses. But I do object to turning the state police into the ‘fun police’.”

By now he was in full flow. “Take the issue of internet porn or the attempt to censor content on Netflix and Amazon Prime. It might sound silly, but in this day and age, who is the government to decide what we should or shouldn’t watch? And please stop being hypocritical here. MLAs have been caught watching porn in the assembly and they are the ones who want a ban on it because ‘it corrupts’ the youth? Grow up, half the youths who have mobiles watch porn on it. And it is not males alone. Females too watch porn – a lot. Whatever their reasons may be to watch adult content, it doesn’t absolve the government of behaving like a policeman? And this government expects the youth to vote for them after behaving like controlling nannies? Of course, if we ask our elder siblings in previous governments if it was any better for them the answer would probably be a resounding ‘no.’”

“I will say one thing though, the censor board has become a lot more lenient since ‘sanskari’ Pahlaj Nihalani stepped down and Prasoon Joshi took over,” his friend D said.

So do you wonder why so many of the young people like me are disillusioned with politicians, D asked? “It is because neither of the two major political parties represents us or what we stand for – a better political system, an improved education policy, an end to stifling restrictions, curbing vigilantism of all types, and religious fanaticism. I don’t claim to speak for my entire generation. We have a diverse variety of problems but these issues do overlap for all of us. Take this state’s politicians. See the Shiv Sena, they act like idea-free ideologues. NCP combines the corruption of UPA 2 with the behaviour of the MNS. Congress, when it was in power proved to be toothless, incompetent and corrupt, and still is. And the BJP has not yet proved to be the change they promised.”

“The 2019 election is the first-ever I am going to vote in, and I could still vote for Narendra Modi because I believe he deserves one more chance to make the changes he had been promising. But what after him or what if something were to happen to Modi before 2024,” A asked? “A lot of people would like to see Yogi Adityanath as PM after Modi. If that happens, I will not vote for BJP again. The thought of an India under that guy scares the hell out of a lot of us.”

“So tell me, after everything we have told you, would you blame us for not voting at all? And if we decide to, can you understand our predicament?”

The cost of taking the MSM lightly

At the Ek Bharat Shreshta Bharat brainstorming session in Delhi, which I was invited to in December last year, during a group discussion, when I said the Bharatiya Janata Party was taking the mainstream media (MSM) too lightly, a bureaucrat cut me short with these words, “That’s because the MSM has been made irrelevant by social media.”

I was amazed and appalled at his smugness. I wondered if the bureaucrats are aware of the seething anger among the MSM for being snubbed and ridiculed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and abused by his army of trolls on social media on a minute-by-minute basis over the past four years. Do they even know how the media, print, broadcast and online, can control the narrative on any subject of interest to the general public and how it can spin it around at its convenience and a time of its choosing? It seems, right from the letter that was signed by the members of parliaments and people of prominence against the visa to Modi, the ‘award wapasi’, and up to the Padamavat release it has been the media that has controlled the narrative.

It has been the media that has assiduously flogged the disgraceful campaign against the film by the Karni Sena, by going overboard in its coverage. At every step, it was the BJP that took a knock. Irrelevant media? How successful the media is has been proved by the fact that after every such orchestrated attempt, it has the government pinned to the wall, looking contrite and apologetic. As it turns out now Karni Sena wasn’t promoted by the fringe but over eager chief ministers of a couple of BJP-ruled states looking to make political capital only ended with egg on the faces.

As 2019 approaches, there is an unease among the mediapersons, even those who have come round to the fact that Modi is in for the long haul, that he is silent when goons and ‘fringe groups’ allegedly owing their allegiance to the saffron brigade run riot around the country. There is also an apprehension among those who dislike Modi that he could get re-elected and that the win in 2014 doesn’t look like just another flash in the pan.

A senior journalist friend I met in Delhi told me, Modi’s silence acts as encouragement for the goons. She gave the example of Hadiya (Akhila) who converted to Islam to marry a Muslim. Why are the people from the right-wing taking up on her behalf when she herself is not interested, she asked? What happened to the Right to Life under Article 21 of the Constitution (Protection of life and personal liberty: No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law)? It’s her life so what right does anyone have to interfere? If she follows her husband to Syria and joins the ISIS and becomes a terrorist she will pay for it. Who gave some unknown entity the right to impose their version of the law? And when this happens Modi keeps silent, she said.

In an Islamic country where more than 98% of them are Muslims, imposing your will could work, but not in India where even if 79.8% of the population of India (2011 census) practices Hinduism, there is a sizeable 14.2% that adheres to Islam (2011 census), and 6% practices other religions (Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and various other indigenous ethnically-bound faiths,. Again, with its 22 national languages and 33 different communities and so many castes imposing one’s will in such a multicultural country could be a recipe for disaster.

The same journalist said, “You condemn Mullahs running countries with their fatwas and their Islamic laws, but you have no problem with a mahant as PM to replace Modi and want India to become a Hindu state? How different are we from them?”

A news anchor I also met the same evening said to me, “Rahul Gandhi is improving” when I asked what Rahul had achieved in 13 years in political life. By the look of things, large sections of the media who despise Modi don’t care what Rahul says or does, just how dumb he is or how dirty he plays, as long as his antics can help in getting rid of Modi – by hook or by crook. Take the most recent incident of his Burberry jacket which costs an astronomical Rs 79,000 (http://www.timesnownews.com/the-buzz/article/rahul-gandhi-indian-national-congress-bharatiya-janata-party-burberry-jacket-meghalaya-shillong-concert-rs-70000-narendra-modi-renuka-chowdhury-suit/194256). Social media was on fire ridiculing the Gandhi scion for his extravagance but did you see too much play in the media about it? Of course not, because everyone just glossed over it and most journalists and media houses ignored it even though it came from someone who spent his holidays abroad but claimed he wore a torn kurta! Contrast that to the furore that erupted when Modi donned the supposedly Rs 10 lakh monogrammed suit. It was presented to him so he wore it and it was later auctioned. Both the issues were not worthy of 5 minutes of airtime, but look how each incident got played.

This is what Rahul Gandhi is so smug about because except for the few who speak against him, the rest of the MSM is, by and large, glossing over every Rahul blooper. And by 2019 it will only get more open and defiant. The BJP and its social media/political managers have a battle ahead.

And there are enough disgruntled elements in their own party who’ll jeer from the sidelines as the Modi/Shah combine do battle alone against the formidable Congress ecosystem. Before that happens, Modi needs to handle the troublemakers and the motor-mouths in his party who are damaging his and the party’s prospects with their indiscriminate utterings and actions. Their two minutes of notoriety is costing the party dear. Like the recent case of the over-zealous right-wing activists who disrupted a Hindu-Muslim wedding even though the families were in agreement.

Then there is the agenda. A couple of years ago, a national newspaper carried this headline “Dalit boy beaten by 4”. Anyone reading the headline would assume the obvious in this day and age. However, the report stated that a Dalit boy was beaten up by four other Dalits. I called a friend in the newspaper and asked why they couldn’t say “4 Dalits beat up boy”. He said it doesn’t sell.

A few decades ago it was common knowledge that if there was a communal riot it usually involved the majority and minority community. Our seniors taught us never to mention either community in a communal strife to ensure we did not inflame passions further. However, today I see news reports that proclaim “Hindu kills Muslim man” I am okay with that because times change and the media need to change with the times. But here’s where the “agenda” coms in. Take the even more recent incident of the young man who was killed by his girlfriend’s family. The headlines didn’t say the boy was a Hindu and the girl a Muslim. Had the genders been interchanged, what would the headline have read? Your guess is as good as mine. There are umpteen such examples. The media is not exactly painting itself in glory with such biased coverage of news, but I think they are beyond caring what anyone thinks of them.

At the same brainstorming session, I also heard thinkers and journalists wax eloquent about integration, and a lot of other blah. My apologies, but it seemed to me that many of them exist in a bubble. I guessed that there were hardcore RSS and right-wing ideologues apart from some journalists and thinkers. Over and over again, they spoke about changing the “narrative”. The problem with that is, you can’t talk of changing a narrative that stresses on winning hearts and making India one, on the one side, and pretend everything is just ‘right’ when goons run amok riding roughshod over people’s ideas and beliefs just because it doesn’t agree with theirs. Or when paid hoodlums manhandle couples or young girls and boys under the pretext of imposing a moral code. Not acceptable. And add to this the frenzied publicity by a gleeful media to motor-mouths and “do-gooders” in the BJP. It will cost the BJP dear by the time 2019 comes around.

Also, to combat the left-liberal ideologues (and they are all over the place), the right-wing needs to come out with a fitting verbal response for every argument, not a slanging match. The right has some articulate speakers and I met some of them at the EBSB meet. There are others I’ve heard and read, but they need much more to engage in a measured debate with the left liberals who have often smoothly taken the debate away from them with ample help from the anchors. Shouting might win you an argument but not the match.

I read recently that the Information and Broadcasting ministry plans to set up more than 60 media units (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/eyes-on-2019-polls-government-plans-over-60-media-units-to-expand-outreach/articleshow/62716129.cms) across the country to strengthen the Modi government’s outreach to smaller cities and rural areas in the run-up to the 2019 general election. It is one of the sensible things being done to combat the left-liberal narrative but it should have been in 2015. But then, Smriti Irani wasn’t the Minister for Information and Broadcasting.