Mr Modi's prose of governance

MODITVA
The Idea Behind the Man
Citizens for Accountable Governance/Siddharth Mazumdar
Navbharat Sahitya Mandir, 2013
Rs 200; 55 pages

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi should have been in advertising. His speeches are packed with peppy buzzwords and catchy slogans, some of which make very little sense when seen in isolation. Someone seems to have figured that out, and thus the Citizens for Accountable Governance - Mr Modi's think tank in Gandhinagar that is, among other things, working on a giant statue of Vallabhbhai Patel called the Statue of Unity - has come out with a slim book it hopes will explain them. The Citizens for Accountable Governance is stocked with idealistic young people, and this earnest book deserves to be taken seriously.

What Moditva: The Idea Behind the Man tries to do is take 14 of Mr Modi's more trite buzzwords - "per drop more crop", or "5F: Farm to fibre, fibre to factory, factory to fashion, fashion to foreign" - and explain what he might mean by them. It is unclear, in many ways, what Mr Modi's own input into this exercise has been. As with much else relating to how Mr Modi's words are interpreted, there may be a certain component of wish fulfilment in both the choice of what is seen as important and the final spin those chosen words from the messiah are given. Mr Modi is not quite as much of a reformist as his most popular slogans would like us to believe; what we continue to search for is a clear articulation that is Mr Modi's own of how he would address the pressing problems of the day. Moditva, while it has some decent big-picture thinking, does not quite contain that vision.

Two things are worth noting: one, parallels with the existing United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government and the speeches of its leader, Manmohan Singh; and two, parallels with Arvind Kejriwal, and the Little Red Book of the Aam Aadmi Party, Swaraj.

On the first, it is evident that while Mr Modi can campaign in somewhat bellicose poetry, to modify Mario Cuomo's famous observation, the governance "vision" laid out of the future in somewhat dead prose is as distant as some of Dr Singh's many speeches about where India should go/have been. Consider, for example, Mr Modi's education slogan, "take the university outside the campus". I read - on that ideal location for bedtime reading, narendramodi.in - a few of Mr Modi's speeches on the subject as well. And it is extraordinary how both speeches and the book essentially repeat concepts that many, including Dr Singh, have stressed for some time - polytechnics, community colleges, mass classes over the Internet, private sector partnerships in the skilling of unskilled labour. It is pretty well understood why these attempts have stuttered under the UPA. How will Mr Modi deliver differently in Delhi? It isn't explained, unless the giant photo of Mr Modi in a purple-and-gold convocation gown, arm extended like Julius Caesar, is supposed to be explanation enough. I guess, for some people, it is.

On the second, there's the odd emphasis on global precursors to Mr Modi's ideas. Mr Kejriwal, in Swaraj, gives many far-flung examples that he claims, wrongly, indicate his programme of radical decentralisation is a silver bullet for governance problems. Here a similar exercise is undertaken for each of the 14 slogans. So, for "snake charmers to mouse charmers" - by which, Mr Modi apparently means more information technology in government and education - we are given the somewhat dated example of Ireland, which Moditva says is a "technology powerhouse" and "one of the most lucrative countries in the world for immigration". Sadly, that Celtic Tiger image was built on hype that collapsed in 2008. Last year, 10 people an hour left Ireland on an average - predominantly the younger, better-educated ones. Global examples such as this are fraught with peril.

Finally, a few words on three of the slogans that seem particularly odd.

First: "Tourism unites, terrorism divides". Tourism "can be a great unifier"; through it "social ills and conflicts can be minimised … if more people choose to go to Kashmir instead of Switzerland, it would weaken the impact of militant forces". I'm not sure how to respond to this. If it is to be taken seriously, then what is the end point of India-Pakistan relations Mr Modi imagines? Given that the global example for this section is the Schengen Agreement, in which countries with a history of war opened their borders, is Mr Modi committing to a radical open-borders policy with Pakistan? And if he really believed tourism would solve ethnic conflict, does his government run package tours to Ahmedabad's Muslim ghetto of Juhapura?

Second: "People public private partnership 4P". (Mr Modi is fond of alliteration.) Here he argues for, essentially, social audits of public-private partnership projects. To the best of my knowledge, even Sonia Gandhi's National Advisory Council hasn't come up with something quite as jholawallah as that.

And finally, "Aatma gaanv ki, suvidha sheher ki" (The soul of a village, the conveniences of a city). This promises, apparently, an India that is superficially modern, but where the civilising and progressive aspects of leaving behind a repressive social past when you move to the city are considered dangerous: "In this rush towards building new cities, the success of villages in preserving culture for centuries is being forgotten." As a slogan for urbanisation, this tells us of everything that's wrong with the Sangh Parivar's vision of India.