Snoopgate - Modi the orator goes silent

Narendra Modi's silence is more deafening than his noisy rhetoric

Narendra Modi and his cadre have frequently launched unsparing attacks on the silence of Manmohan Singh – his stoic responses on corruption and the myriad other challenges confronting this country. Internet denizens too and the TV studio contingent are yet to tire out with their vocal assails on the PM’s unwillingness to talk. And jokes about this tragic inability/disinclination of our premier to communicate are shared dime a dozen. Modi on the other hand is fêted, for being India’s finest orator - the only politician in our day to wow with his natural art of public speaking, draw crowds of a lakh plus at rallies, mesmerize audiences by pulling one verbal punch after another and drown himself in guaranteed applause.

In the past few days though, when he’s got much to make known, Narendra Modi – Chief Minister of Gujarat and Prime Minister in running has gone eerily quiet - his silence more disconcerting due to the personal nature of the charges leveled against him and his second in command, in what’s now come to be known as India’s Snoopgate, er…Stalkgate scandal.  

 

It was timely for Modi that the nation’s attention (gauged speciously by the fleeting agendas set by television channels) over the past three days shifted to two other sensational stories – the contentious verdict in the Arushi Talwar murder and the sexual assault of a woman journalist by one of India’s best known editors. But with chilling new details emerging on how illegal surveillance of a Bangalore based Gujarati woman architect close to the Gujarat Chief Minister went beyond just her, the storm is unlikely to retreat in a haste. Modi, will have to speak up. 

 

The BJP has maintained all along, if in vain that it was only carrying out surveillance based on written requests from the girl’s father. And while the party was unable to put out a compelling defense on why the language used in the phone conversations allegedly between former minister of home for state, Amit Shah and IPS officer GL Singhal sounded more like stalking and less like surveillance, the girl’s father’s letter to the National Commission for Women stating that no probe was needed, gave BJP the ammunition to dismiss any wrong doing. Questions regarding the scale and intensity of the surveillance and the legality of putting a large mass of the state intelligence machinery behind a girl who plausibly posed no threat to law and order were obscured by a volley of attacks on the government. It became, as it always does when political parties try and obfuscate issues, a Congress Vs BJP slinging match.

 

Much as the BJP might try and render it as that, it no longer remains an ‘innocent’ battle of political blood feud, with startling new twists and turns emerging almost on a daily basis.

 

Reports now suggest, suspended IAS officer Pradeep Sharma, who alleges that the Gujarat government framed him in criminal cases, has officially confirmed in an affidavit that he was victimized by the Modi government as he knew of a relationship between the woman architect and the Chief Minister of Gujarat.  Sharma’s affidavit also purportedly claims as reported by the Times of India that he was targeted because Modi mistakenly suspected him of possessing a video CD. Moreover, the Congress has now alleged that the Gujarat police had made a staggering 93,000 illegal interceptions in 7 months even keeping journalists and businessmen under scrutiny according to the Economic Times.

 

In any other reasonably well functioning democracy, charges of such grievous nature would have been hard to evade. President Obama was immediate in his response to the spying allegations that surfaced in the Snowden documents. Modi & Co. however have used the woman’s silence and disinclination to let the matter be probed further as a shield for their own reluctance to speak up. That is no longer a valid justification given that Sharma’s revelations in his affidavit point to the fact that state machinery could have been unleashed to intimidate and not protect and new findings suggest that interceptions were more widespread.

 

Modi’s silence on the matter reveals yet again the two conflicting faces of the man. One of the articulate, socially gregarious orator and marketing mastermind, the other of a man who has much to hide, a man who walks out of interviews when quizzed about uncomfortable issues related to the 2002 gujarat riots, a man who retreats when confronted.

 

He must speak, not least because silence is construed as complicity, but also because we cannot have yet another Prime Minister, (if he does get the mandate) who chooses to sing the ghostly sound of silence.