From broom to pills: Modi's journey from Swachh Bharat to Ayushman Bharat

Since becoming PM in 2014, Modi has sauntered from one 'event' to another. Their success continues to be debated, but his ability to amplify buzz around schemes and policies is beyond doubt

At the peak of the much-touted ‘Modi wave’ of 2014, what senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L K Advani had said after filing his nomination papers from the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha seat on April 5 has not only turned out to be prophetic but also the leitmotif of the Narendra Modi government. Advani had referred to Modi as a “brilliant events manager”.

From sweeping the streets on camera to wearing fancy hornbill hats, and from deep emotional conversations on radio to animating a roaring lion to the tune of “Vande Mataram” in Germany — Modi’s impact starts with Modi’s pitch itself, say observers.

All eyes, therefore, are now on how the prime minister rolls out what people inside the system believe to be his last throw of dice before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. On Sunday, Modi will launch the Pradhan Mantri Jan Aarogya Yojana (PMJAY), his government’s universal healthcare scheme for 100 million poor families, in Jharkhand’s Ranchi.

Modi had revealed his eye for the dramatic right from the start of his run as the country’s prime minister. At his oath-taking ceremony on May 26, 2014, he bedazzled all who had doubted his understanding of foreign policy by inviting the leaders of all Saarc (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) nations. Bang on! Later, on his first day in office, his Cabinet constituted a special investigation team on black money, a crackdown on which had been his biggest poll promise to the electorate.

Since then, Modi has sauntered from one event to another. The assessment of whether these have been successes or failures, or petered out after initial promise, remains divided. But what is of little doubt is the prime minister’s ability to galvanise staid government machinery and social media to amplify the buzz around government schemes and policies.

The launch of PMJAY comes a little over a month before Assembly elections in three key North Indian states — Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan —and Modi will have something new to take to the people during his election rallies.

Winning elections — even in the smallest of states — and enthralling the Indian diaspora, have been a focus area for the PM. Most of his government’s iconic schemes and decisions have been announced before key state Assembly polls or foreign visits, and launched with some fanfare with the PM speaking about these at length in his election rallies.

If PMJAY is preceding the Assembly elections to five states, Modi’s first Independence Day speech in 2014 had preceded elections to Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, and his maiden visit to the United States.

The first launch spree

On August 15, 2014, Modi announced the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) for financial inclusion and the Swachh Bharat mission. Neither was new, but the PM invested his personality in the two schemes. In the first week of its rollout, the PMJDY was touted as a Guinness record for opening 15 million new bank accounts.

On September 25, the PM launched the ‘Make in India’ scheme, making the likes of Mukesh Ambani and the Lockheed Martin India CEO speak at the event. Two days later, in his maiden speech at the UN General Assembly, Modi asked member states to mark June 21 as the International Day of Yoga, and a day after that he later swept the Indian diaspora in the US with his speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Few prime ministers before him had reached out to the diaspora the way he has done in the past four years.

On his return to India, the PM had a broom in his hand as he swept the corner of a Dalit locality in New Delhi’s Mandir Marg to mark the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi on October 2, and officially launch the Swachh Bharat campaign. He followed it up the next day with his ‘Mann ki Baat’ radio broadcast to the nation, and subsequently launched himself headlong in winning the Jharkhand, Haryana and Maharashtra elections for his party.

It was a time when the PM would utter acronyms like JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhar-Mobile) with felicity. The Swachh Bharat campaign is back in the public imagination with the government planning to mark the 150th birth anniversary celebrations of Gandhi from October 2. Notice that the tagline has changed: from the generous “Ek kadam swachchata ki or” to the assertive “swachchata hi seva”.

The BJP won the three states. And, soon enough, there was another surprise around the corner. Riding high on popularity, he welcomed the then US President, Barack Obama, at the Republic Day parade in 2015, wearing a suit with his name monogrammed on it.

This came at a time when nearly all the Opposition parties, as also Sangh Parivar outfits, opposed his government’s land acquisition Bill. Congress’ Rahul Gandhi called Modi’s a “suit boot ki sarkar” (a government of and for moneybags), and Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party won a famous victory in Delhi two weeks later.

The PM did not altogether forget the BJP’s 2014 poll promise of reform, but the Delhi defeat and the Congress leader’s jibe jolted Modi to alter his government’s philosophy from ‘reform’ to ‘garib kalyan’ or the welfare of the poor. He spoke of this for the first time in his speech at the BJP national executive in Bengaluru in the first week of April of 2015.

A week later, Modi was on a foreign visit. In the German city of Hanover. In the presence of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and leading lights of Indian industry, the ‘Make in India’ programme was relaunched with a roaring lion. Modi also visited France and announced the Rafale fighter jet deal that came out strongly in the media.

There was another push to the ‘Make in India’ scheme in Mumbai during the ‘Make in India’ week in February 2016, but the event is now better remembered for the fire that engulfed the makeshift venue.

The PM felt the need not only to burnish his pro-poor credentials, but also that he should be seen delivering on his other big poll promise of providing millions of jobs each year.

On April 8, the PM launched the Mudra Bank scheme that would give small loans to help the poor become self-employed. On July 15, 2015, he launched the Skill India mission, with the objective of training 400 million people by 2022. If the last century belonged to the IITs (Indian Institute of Technology), Modi said, this one would be of ITI (Industrial Training Institute).

The Mudra scheme has become a butt of ridicule since the PM spoke of making pakodas, or fritters, as a viable job option, and data revealed that most borrowers had received loans of less than Rs 50,000. The Skill India mission is no longer spoken of, and Rajiv Pratap Rudy, who initially handled the portfolio, was dropped from the council of ministers. That year’s Independence Day also saw the launch of ‘start-up’ and ‘stand-up India’.

Changing the rhetoric from providing self-employment to saving middle-class money, on May 1, 2015, he launched the Ujala scheme to provide LED bulbs to households at subsidised rates. A year after the Ujala launch, he claimed Indian households saved Rs 200 billion on account of cheaper LED bulbs and reduced electricity bills.

India is Yoga, Yoga is India

Less than a month later, the first international yoga day was celebrated on June 21, 2015, with the PM leading the exercises at Raj Path in New Delhi, and Indian missions organising it in foreign capitals. The event has continued to be marked with some verve by the government and the BJP every year, and has won the PM admirers among yoga practitioners and middle-class Indians.

Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah’s efforts in Bihar couldn’t match the magic of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad. Subsequent elections in the summer of 2016 — West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry — were not among BJP’s strongholds. They didn’t bring the party any joy, but it secured a majority of its own in Assam, and stormed to power in that state for the first time in its history.

The next stop was winning Uttar Pradesh in March 2017, and the launch of schemes was suitably tailored. It was also the time of changes in Delhi. All ministers had already been asked to think of not only the schemes that their ministry could launch, but also of events that could be held around the schemes. Press Information Bureau and BJP’s social media teams were asked to generate a social media storm over any scheme the government launched.

For Uttar Pradesh, the Modi government repackaged the Pahal DBT LPG subsidy scheme as Ujjwala to launch it on the International Day of Labour on May 1, 2016, from Ballia. Modi called himself the country’s “mazdoor number one”. “Sweat of a labourer has the cementing power to unite the world,” he thundered.

In between, the PM also pursued extolling the contribution of Dalit icon and architect of the Constitution B R Ambedkar. A special session of Parliament was called in November 2015 to commemorate Ambedkar’s contribution, and 125 years of his birth was celebrated by the BJP and RSS.

Shock in the middle

The shock came on November 8, 2016, when the PM announced demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes. Though it caused immediate hardship and its outcome was heavily tilted towards the inconsequential, BJP did win a famous victory in Uttar Pradesh in March 2017.

His UP poll promise of waiving farm debt reverberated across the country in due time, with five states pledging an unprecedented Rs 1.3 trillion from state coffers for these waivers.

But in less than a year, the party was to lose Lok Sabha bypolls in the same state’s Phulpur, Gorakhpur and Kairana seats, as the Dalit anger turned against it for continued atrocities on the community by upper castes. The killing of six farmers in Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh and farm distress in north India made the Centre announce MSP increase.

Apart from demonetisation, the Modi government spent much of 2016 and 2017 preparing for the goods and services tax (GST) rollout, and ensuring the passage of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. If the PM had paid a surprise visit to Pakistan in December of 2015, followed by the Pathankot terror attack, the September of 2016 witnessed the ‘surgical strikes’, and Modi celebrated Dussehra in Lucknow by ‘slaying the demon king Ravana’.

The GST was rolled out on the midnight of June 30. “At the midnight hour, we would be launching India’s biggest and most ambitious tax and economic reform in history,” said Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. But GST turned out to be a hot potato, and Modi had to invest much of his personal popularity to take BJP to a win in the Gujarat Assembly polls in December.

Subsequently, the BJP defeated its ideological enemy, the Left parties, in Tripura, but failed to form a government in Karnataka. As the 2019 elections get nearer, Modi has turned to communicating with people directly through the ‘NaMo’ app. Ministries have also been asked to make a list of projects which can be inaugurated in the next few months, while another suggestion has asked them to encourage videos where beneficiaries of schemes thank the PM.

Though the frequency of events has reduced a little, the budget of 2018-19 carried two key promises of mass appeal. The first one, on ensuring a good minimum support price to farmers, was delivered later with a mechanism for farm procurement in place now. Through the second promise, which is his government’s most ambitious, Modi intends to give health solutions to half of India.

As Modi inaugurates PMJAY, the biggest part of Ayushman Bharat with vivacity coming Sunday, the bigger question is: With months to go for the Lok Sabha polls, will Modi be able to brew the kind of chemistry that he created in 2014?