So, the interview of the decade, the most awaited pow-wow of the elections, the undisputed biggie of all TV shows, was aired last evening, when Narendra Modi faced Arnab Goswami on Frankly Speaking.
After the much commented on Rahul Gandhi interview on the same platform, in which the Congress vice-president scored a staggering amount of self goals, this one was being watched not only for what the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate would reveal about his vision for the nation, but also as a kind of virtual arm-wrestling between the two men.
Many years ago, on September 26, 1960, it is said the American elections were decided when the unshaven, underweight, just-out-of-hospital Vice-president Richard Nixon took on the unknown young senator from Massachusetts, John F Kennedy, in the first televised American presidential debate. His challenger's handsome head of hair, sun-kissed complexion and big shiny teeth captured the public's imagination, and many mark that moment as epochal. It forever established the role of image and mass media in the political narrative.
What was interesting in the Nixon-Kennedy standoff was that those who heard their debate on radio came away thinking Nixon had scored over his opponent. But by then 88 per cent of American households possessed TV sets and for the 74 million people who tuned in that day, Kennedy, with his handsome boyish charm and his promise of change, had won the day.
Something similar appears to have happened last evening in India.
While there had been an edge-of-the-chair, sweaty anxiousness about the way Gandhi had faced his interviewer, Modi sat firm, his weight comfortably distributed on his feet, his bull-like neck in firm control of the situation, his eyes pinning Goswami down with their steely gaze.
It was a fine balance he had to strike: to be seen as being firm, strong, unafraid and unapologetic, but without coming across as being dictatorial, domineering or too threatening. And Modi managed to strike it well.
Gone was the jeering, rousting tone of the public rallies he had addressed or the playing-to-the-gallery, singsong delivery. Here his sentences were crisp and laden with factual riposte. When Goswami questioned him about his remarks on West Bengal's immigrants, he reeled off an impressive set of dates and quotes: "I'm saying the same thing that the Supreme Court has said. I am saying the same thing that Mamata Banerjee said on August 4 in 2005 in Parliament. I am repeating the same thing that Indrajeet Gupta, as home minister, said in 1996. And I am restating what P M Sayeed, as as minister of state for home, had said in 1995."
And just when his nod in the direction of Atal Bihari Vajpayee - "votes aayenge jayenge, sarkarein aayegi jayegi, desh sarvapratham hai" - seemed to indicate a softening of hard-line stand in favour of a statesman-like approach and began to appear like too much of a good thing, he firmly rapped Goswami on the knuckles on the 2002 riot issue. "You cannot trap me. Your duty is to ask questions and mine is to answer, but this is not the right way to go about it!" he said.
What was most interesting was that Modi - like the two other men at the helm of these elections, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal - appeared to suffer from a persecution complex. He constantly harped on people's prejudices against him and his party, and how he was being deliberately misrepresented and misunderstood. This might be a good sign.
Perhaps when he finally assumes office in New Delhi, that feeling will melt away and he will become the statesman that this country and its people - every one of them - sorely needs.
One can only hope.
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com
