THE MODI EFFECT
Inside Narendra Modi's campaign to transform India
Lance Price
Hodder & Stoughton, 2015;
344 pages; Rs 599
Good news for all those just returning to our Lonely Planet after more than a year's space travel. Lance Price, a British journalist and publicist who worked with Tony Blair, tells you all about the tumultuous Indian General Election of the last year. Well, I exaggerate, not quite all, but he touches all the bases anyway. For the rest of the ordinary folk who lived through the carpet bombing of election reporting and analysis on all media and the books that followed them as inexorably as night follows day, be warned: despite the "exclusive access" Mr Price had to Narendra Modi and his advisors, he doesn't quite "lift the lid" on all the tricks as the publisher's blurb would have us believe. Unless, of course, you accept that message management and information technology wizardry were all that created the "vote winning colossus of awesome proportions".
But we must be fair to Mr Price. He claims that he has tried his "best to make the story accessible to those outside India" and asks Indians to bear with him "if sometimes my explanations seem obvious or unnecessary". Becomingly modest, to be sure, but notice the clever qualifier "sometimes". That should rule out the possibility that these explanations are obvious or unnecessary all or most of the times, right?
After a quick recap of the prime minister's Independence Day address (the high point of his premiership so far in this reviewer's opinion), Mr Price puts in a few broad strokes of Mr Modi's earlier incarnations from a chaiwalla to the chief minister of Gujarat before getting into campaign 2014. We then meet all the usual suspects - the volunteers managing the media, advisors, technology geeks with new-fangled 3D holograms, advertising gurus and apparatchiks, politicians of all hues, campaign strategists led by the redoubtable Amit Shah, and the analysts and commentators who kept you informed/amused/irritated (take your pick) night after gruelling night all those months last year. They are all here, saying pretty much all that they have said more than once. So here is a good reminder of all that, even if your memory is not fading one whit.
Mr Price also covers, in the interest of thoroughness one presumes, events since June 2014, such as state Assembly elections (including Delhi in February 2015), Mr Modi's various slogans and campaigns as prime minister, his visits abroad and those of high-profile world leaders to India at Mr Modi's behest. That is quite a plateful but, then, Lonely Planet guides include all esoterica of possible interest to backpack-toting budget travellers to exotic locations. The book also shares the fate of guidebooks put together in a hurry: lax copy-editing, although the high praise showered upon Mr Price's previous books could justifiably arouse expectations to the contrary.
Mr Price tells us who did what in the Modi campaign and, at times, even how they did it. But we don't learn why it succeeded. Unless, of course, we believe that the electors were so many sheep following the directions of the collies who managed Mr Modi's media campaign and rallies.
That is because in the otherwise formidable assemblage of Mr Price's repertoire of information, news and views, there is one source prominent by its absence: the voter. The author was not expected to interview people in the street many months after the event, but surely there was a wealth of data from all those pre- and post-election surveys, many conducted by eminently reputed scholars and agencies, that provided exhaustive details of what troubled the people before the elections and how it influenced their voting. The author makes obligatory references to corruption, crime and the worsening economic situation leading up to 2014, but that is not really quite up to snuff.
And as for Mr Modi's positive appeal, surely it went beyond his indefatigable travel, impressive rallies and ringing (if at times too loud) oratory. Mr Price refers to Mr Modi's chief ministerial career in Gujarat, but does not pause to analyse why that would appeal to voters in distant Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. Despite all the cherry-picking of the records indulged in by Mr Modi and his critics, there is no gainsaying the appeal Gujarat and its record had for the rest of India.
And what of the exclusive and exhaustive access Mr Price had to Mr Modi and his advisors? Well, we learn that Mr Modi prefers straight-backed chairs, believes that he has a God-given gift for dressing well and that on May 16, 2014, when the election results came out, he remained cut off from the world until mid-day. We also learn how exasperating but equally exhilarating it was for Piyush Pande, Prasoon Joshi and their colleagues in the ad world to work on the campaign in the teeth of impossible deadlines. We read the papers and watch telly, even in the back of the beyond in India, Mr Price, thank you very kindly.
So election books promising much but delivering little are not the monopoly of Indian writers. But, then, the Lonely Planet guides were never epitomes of expositions of the cultural ethos of the countries they described, were they?
