Episode 56: India’s Modi Will (Likely) Get the Most Votes in Human History. Why?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is the most popular leader in the world — and he’s poised to win reelection to a third term. With his embrace of religious nationalism, is India’s secular democracy in peril? Or is Modi just giving the country’s 1.1 billion Hindus what they want?
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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(Celebratory music playing)
In January, the northern Indian city of Ayodhya was electric with anticipation.
ARCHIVAL IndiaToday Reporter: Everybody has been waiting for this moment. It has come now. We are going to be witnessing the history-making.
A massive Hindu temple that had taken years to construct at a cost of nearly $250 million was to be consecrated that day. And in attendance, thousands of special guests, including Bollywood stars and foreign dignitaries. Ten tons of flowers were ordered to decorate the temple, and the smell of incense was thick in the air.
Many of the people in the crowd were crying tears of joy.
Bharat Barai: Oh, I felt great. Both me and my wife cried along with thousands of people who were there, we all cried.
Ravi Agrawal: It was a national moment of pride and celebration. It was a moment that was inarguably a big new Indian holiday.
At the center of this new Indian holiday - Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As the ceremony begins, he walks down a red carpet dressed in a cream-colored kurta–which is a knee-length collarless shirt. Modi is there to infuse the Temple's idol of the Hindu God Ram with life.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: Ideally, I would have expected a religious leader, one of the high priests of Hindu society to be performing this.
Instead, Prime Minister Modi led the whole religious ceremony, playing the role of a Hindu priest. Officially speaking, India is a secular country, so to have its elected leader play the role of a high priest in a televised ceremony? It was pretty strange. For many Indians watching on television, it wasn’t a moment of celebration at all.
Indira Jaising: I drew the curtains. I did not want to see groups of people who were celebrating on the street. I don't expect my prime minister to consecrate a temple, in full view of the whole country. It could have unleashed riots.
That's because the Ram temple is the most controversial site in all of India. Built on the ruins of a 16th-century mosque that was destroyed by a mob of Hindu nationalists in 1992, this new temple symbolizes how Hinduism is moving to the center of Indian life, while religious minorities like India’s 200 hundred million Muslims are increasingly feeling marginalized.
It's no accident that Modi, who many say is one of the world's most media-savvy politicians, chose the Ram temple site to launch his re-election campaign.
Today, a look at the man at the center of this religious ceremony slash election campaign event as he competes to remain prime minister in the largest election in the history of the world with close to a billion eligible voters.
India, the most populous country in the world, where more than one hundred languages are spoken across more than a million square miles, was founded on principles of secularism and democracy. It was something of a miracle for this very diverse nation to come together in the first place. So, why did Modi kick off his campaign for re-election here, at a Hindu temple? And does it mean that the very idea of India is changing?
I'm Peter Bergen. Welcome to In the Room.
(Theme Music)
Ravi Agrawal: There have always been all of these competing ideas for what India should be.
This is Ravi Agrawal, CNN’s former bureau chief in India and now the editor of Foreign Policy magazine and the author of a recent cover story titled The New Idea Of India, about how this once-secular nation is transforming under Modi. India was founded in 1947, after almost a century of British rule.
Ravi Agrawal: The idea that prevailed from India's founding through until perhaps recently is that India is a quilt patchwork of different cultures, regions, languages, cuisines, histories, that is somehow knitted together through a belief that it can be one country under the flag and umbrella of India, but is not exclusionary of any group. So it is very secular. It welcomes people of all faiths, cultures, religions, languages. It doesn't prioritize any one of these things. Now, at least that was the idea that prevailed, through the founding of India in its constitution until Modi's electoral dominance.
Peter Bergen: So what has happened to that idea of India in your view?
Ravi Agrawal: A new idea of India is beginning to emerge, which is Modi's idea of India, a Hindu first, Hindi first nation. This new vision is all about “Get with the program. This is what India has always been. It's a Hindu nation. This is a civilization and a people that is waking up, that is finally finding its voice and finding its place in the world. And don't get in the way.”
The consecration of the Ram temple epitomized this shift.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: I'm not a great religious scholar, but I know that much, that this is a fairly complex religious ritual.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is the author of a book about the Ram temple, and he also wrote a biography of Modi, who he spent quite a lot of time with in the room.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: The prime minister was enacting the role of the high priest of Hindu society.
Peter Bergen: That's fascinating. What was the message he was trying to communicate?
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: I think the message was fairly clear that he's given what the Hindus wanted and he wanted the support of the Hindus. Immediately after completing the ritual inside the temple, he just stepped out, in a place, you know, which overlooks where people were sitting, that the audiences were sitting and where the television cameras were there. From there, he delivered a fairly political speech.
Peter Bergen: And it was effectively the launch of his campaign.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: It was effectively the launch of his campaign.
To say that the temple was built on a destroyed mosque doesn't quite capture the violence and trauma of that destruction.
(ARCHIVAL news clip, ambient sounds of demolition)
In 1992, a large crowd broke down the barriers around the mosque, which had been there for nearly 500 years, and had been built on top of a spot where Hindus believe that the god Ram was born.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The crowd seemed to go out of control.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The mood switched from defiance to frenzy and then madness during those critical hours that stunned the nation.
They used shovels, pick axes, even their bare hands and destroyed the mosque in a matter of hours.
Ravi Agrawal: Even Hindu leaders recoiled from what they had unleashed because it was an awful thing that had happened.
India is a secular nation according to its constitution, but 80 percent of its population are Hindus. But in a country of 1.4 billion people, there are still hundreds of millions of people in the minority. Of them about 200 million are Muslim, who on their own would exceed the entire population of, say, Egypt.
Back in 1992, tensions between Muslims and Hindus were nothing new. But the destruction of the mosque and the riots that followed made many Muslims doubt their future in the country.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: It's not just a loss of confidence in the government of the day, but also a questioning of the Indian State's commitment to secularism. Though few Muslims believe it's completely finished, in many eyes, the commitment is now in doubt.
That suspicion was confirmed when Modi led the ceremony in January to consecrate that new Hindu temple.
To understand a leader like Modi – who is espousing a Hindu-first vision – you have to go back and unravel how both India and Modi came of age.
Modi was born in 1950, just three years after the British left India. He lived in a town called Vadnagar in the Northwest state of Gujarat. Biographer Mukhopadhyay went back to that town in 2011 to try and meet some of the people who knew Modi in his youth.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: They were from a lower-middle-class family. His father was a trader. He had a small shop, Used to sell just about anything and everything which a daily household would require. He also used to make some tea for the people who would come to the market and congregate in front of his shop.
This is one of those stories you hear a lot about Modi's childhood: that he spent it selling tea at a train station, and his family lived without electricity in a town with no paved roads. This might paint a picture of a child from an extraordinarily poor background, struggling to survive. But Mukhopadhyay says that's kind of misleading.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: He didn't grow up in abject poverty if we are actually talking in relative terms. I don't think that the family would not have had two square meal a day, uh, you know, right through his childhood, maybe not a very lavish meal. But I don't think that anybody would have gone hungry, slept hungry in his family.
Modi was a bright pupil in school. And when he was finished with class he’d often spend some time in his father’s shop.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: And if it meant going and handing over a cup of tea to somebody, that does not make him a tea seller. That does not even make his father a tea seller, because his father was selling all kinds of things.
But this image of Modi — compelled to work from a young age, selling tea in his father’s humble shop — is one he's promoted.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: Fishing for sympathy is what I would call it. That is what Modi has done, always.
There wasn’t much for a kid in his village to do besides study and work. But there was this Hindu-nationalist organization called the RSS, founded back in 1925, long before India gained its independence. The RSS had a chapter in Modi’s town, pretty much the only extracurricular activity available for the young Modi.
Peter Bergen: Can you explain what the RSS is? It seems like an organization that it's hard for somebody who's not Indian to kind of fully get it's almost like a monastic fraternity that seems to sometimes use violence…
Ravi Agrawal: Yeah, it's a complicated thing to describe, it's sort of a Hindu social, community organization.
Here's journalist Ravi Agrawal again.
Ravi Agrawal: Their founding purpose was to create a Hindu nation and it sort of tried to put forward this idea that as we're thinking about what an Indian state could be, it should be a Hindu state. And that Muslims, for example, are outsiders.
The RSS also found ideological inspiration from very strange groups in Europe, for example in the 30s, they sent a delegation to Italy to meet with Benito Mussolini…
ARCHIVAL Old Newsreel: (Mussolini speaking in Italian, crowd cheering)
…and they ended up sort of modeling a lot of how the party was structured on Mussolini's party. So education systems where members would live and be trained, RSS members would wear uniforms, they’d do military drills. Which is why the RSS is also often described as a paramilitary group that has drawn its inspiration from fascism, basically.An RSS member, for example, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.
It was, of course, Gandhi who was the most famous exponent of the view that Indians of all faiths should live in harmony and on equal footing; beliefs that he paid for with his life at the hands of the RSS.
ARCHIVAL Old Newsreel: (music) The hand of an assassin ended the life of a great man who sacrificed all in the cause of brotherhood and peace among his people…
Ravi Agrawal: One of the founders of the RSS actually made a public argument that Muslims were foreign snakes. The implication being that they should leave, they should form their own country. And of course, that in part, was the basis for making the case for the creation of Pakistan.
The subcontinent was divided into India and Pakistan in 1947, when the British finally packed up and left. In turn, millions of people also packed up. Muslims left for newly-created Pakistan and Hindus there fled to India. Some one million people were killed during this massive population transfer that often turned violent.
(Music)
Modi first started going to RSS programs at the age of eight, though his biographer Mukhopadhyay says he didn’t get seriously involved until he was older. As a teenager, Modi left his hometown to make a spiritual pilgrimage.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: It was a fairly common practice among the Hindu youngsters, especially the males. To become a saint, you know, to get ordained into a religious order.
Modi went to the Himalayas and stayed in a few ashrams there before returning home. And though he was technically married to a young woman his parents had arranged a marriage with, he essentially ran away from that marriage and family life to be with his RSS family. At first, his duties were pretty humble.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: He initially started basically by looking after the office, cleaning it up, taking care of the leaders, washing their clothes…
And Modi rose quickly within the RSS, becoming the head of a regional branch of the organization by the late 1970’s. And not long after, his organizing skills were noted by high ranking members of the newly formed BJP, the political wing of the RSS which shared the same ideological belief that Hinduism should be at the core of India’s national identity.
In 2001, Modi was appointed chief minister of Gujarat — like becoming the governor of a large US state - though Gujarat has a bigger population than California and New York combined.
It was at this point that Mukhopadhyay the biographer sensed that Modi was very likely to become India's next prime minister. To him, Modi was clearly a natural politician.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: It's a perfectly packaged product for the political arena - well groomed, well attired. The spectacles in place, the pen in place. The jacket stitched to perfection. He uses the right vocabulary. He is the most performative political leader that you can think of in the world today.
And long before most Indians gained access to television or the internet, Modi understood the power of image. He would even have his speeches broadcast in communal spaces in villages around India. They’d watch him talk about his social programs and his vision for the country from massive television monitors on top of trucks.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: Taking a video image into a common space, gathering together and listening to a Modi speech, which he's delivering from somewhere far. It's something which you know, really I would say that somebody who had great farsightedness to be able to do it.
By the time Mukhopadhyay approached Modi with the idea to write an unauthorized biography, Mukhopadhyay had already written a few critical pieces about Modi. So he was surprised that Modi agreed to speak with him at all.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: He comes across as a fairly friendly person, but also somebody who, if the need be, is willing to intimidate you. If you ask something wrong — wrong meaning that if you ask something by way of extracting some words out of him on a subject which you know he does not speak about much, but you still try your luck in case you can get away with it — so, there is a look of disapproval.
The most disturbing episode in Modi's political career is his ambiguous role in large-scale riots that took place in the state that he governed, Gujarat, in 2002 .
ARCHIVAL Tom Brokaw: In India, the worst religious bloodshed in that country in a decade. For a second day, Hindu mobs attacked Muslims in towns across the western state of Gujarat.
Modi's passive reaction to the violence has been heavily criticized.
ARCHIVAL BBC Documentary: Narendra Modi had directed the police force to step down, look the other way.
As the chief minister of Gujarat, Modi was known for his high levels of competence. One might have expected that he'd be capable of deploying police to effectively quash the riots. But instead, the riots went on for days and at least a thousand people died, most of them Muslims. Since then Modi hasn't been especially empathetic about the deaths that took place on his watch.
Here he is in an interview with a BBC reporter after the riots.
ARCHIVAL BBC Reporter: We're seeing people living in fear. What has gone wrong with this breakdown in law and order here?
Modi: I think you have to correct your information first. The state is very, very peaceful.
BBC Reporter: So the Muslims who would say that they are still terrified, they are still frightened to go back to their homes, they still feel that the people who murdered their relatives have not been brought to justice, what would you say to them?
Modi: I'm not agree with your analysis. I'm not agree with your information. This absolutely misguided information to you from where you have picked up this type of garbage, I do not know.
After those riots, the Bush administration wouldn’t let Modi get a visa to travel to the US. While India's Supreme Court looked into whether Modi played a role in the violence that was unleashed, and concluded that he wasn’t responsible, lawyer Indira Jaising says the team that was assigned by the supreme court to investigate the case was suspect.
Indira Jaising: A fact-finding team was set up by the Supreme Court consisting of retired policemen, et cetera, et cetera. They are the only people who've managed to question Modi during the course of their investigation. No one else, no court of law has been able to question Modi on what happened in 2002. The truth is not on the table.
Indira Jaising isn't just any lawyer. She's kind of a Ruth Bader Ginsburg figure in India, who's championed everything from women's rights to gay rights, to the welfare of India’s so-called pavement dwellers, to people who are HIV positive.
Indira Jaising: There are a lot of firsts in my life. I've often wondered myself how this came about. Yes, I was the first woman to be designated Senior Counsel, which is the equivalent of Queen's Counsel or King's Counsel in the UK. I guess because I was very passionate about issues of nondiscrimination based on sex. I was the first woman to be appointed additional Solicitor General of India in the Supreme Court.
And Jaising’s law firm, which also represented Muslim victims of the 2002 Gujarat riots, has drawn Modi’s anger. After the law firm accepted support for their work from foreign groups, the Modi government accused them of using the funds for political purposes and canceled their registration.
Indira Jaising: What Modi is trying to do is to put culture, and cultural nationalism as a norm above the Constitution of India. And being a lawyer, my concern is this should not seep into the Indian judiciary.
Peter Bergen: Tell us about the Constitution of India.
Indira Jaising: I think it's one of the best in the world. And, why do I say this? I say this because it's truly secular. Why is that a surprise? It's a surprise because it was drafted at a time when the subcontinent faced severe communal violence. So, those who drafted the Constitution of India had to make a choice. Would they want a Hindu homeland or would they want a nation which welcomed people of all religions?
Our drafting fathers and mothers of the constitution chose to keep it a secular constitution with no allegiance to any state religion, which is why it's one of the best constitutions in the world. It has guarantees of non-discrimination, non-discrimination based on caste, on sex, on race, on religion, on place of residence.
Jaising is a feisty and unapologetic critic of Modi and that’s something that's getting harder and harder to find in India these days. In fact, Modi is tremendously popular in India - with an approval rating as high as 75 percent. He has a lot more supporters than critics.
Ravi Agrawal: Modi's a bit of a Rorschach test. There's a lot of people who like to see him as this strongman dictator type. And then you've got a group of people in India who just think he is the best thing to have happened to India in the last seven decades. And I think for all of us who are trying to understand India and understand Modi, we kind of have to thread the needle and look at both sides and appreciate what is a complicated picture. Modi is not Trump. He did not co-opt a party. He is espousing a hundred-year-old party vision.
Modi was raised on the vision of the RSS, which believes that the Indian constitution and its mandate of secularism is actually a mistake, and that India should be and should always have been a Hindu-first nation.
Often in Indian political discourse, these beliefs are hinted at through the use of certain phrases. I asked Ravi Agrawal about these dog whistles.
Ravi Agrawal: I hate them. I don't like saying them aloud. There is the word, kaatana, which literally means someone who's cut. So a circumcised man. There is the word mullah to describe, you know, a Muslim leader immediately making that person a religious figure, which they may or may not be.
Those are sort of the religion-infused terms that are often used to describe just regular Muslims, 200 million Muslims, in a way that is wink wink, nod nod, they're different from us, they're to be sidelined. They're not Indian, in other words, is the insinuation.
And there are also far more explicit ways that this agenda has been pushed. One example is the recent passage of a law that makes it easier for undocumented immigrants from neighboring countries to become naturalized Indian citizens - unless they happen to be Muslim. Modi’s administration says that the law is designed to help people fleeing religious persecution - but opponents say it singles Muslims out.
Indira Jaising: We argue that this act is based on religion alone. Why can't similar treatment be given to Muslims?
And the law doesn’t just impact Muslims immigrating to India. Ravi Agrawal says it also impacts Muslims who were born there.
Ravi Agrawal: In a sense that law also makes it harder for Indian Muslims to prove their citizenship if they need to prove their citizenship. So, a lot of poorer Indians don't always have paperwork, may not have a birth certificate.
That means even if you were born in India, but don’t have proof, you can be treated as a noncitizen. Modi himself, during his election campaign in April, referred to Muslims in India as “infiltrators.”
ARCHIVAL Modi (In Hindi): To the infiltrators. Do you think your hard-earned money should be given to infiltrators?
This is a lot more than just a dog whistle and gets to the heart of Modi’s vision, which is to wipe out any vestige of colonial rule, most recently by the British and before them, the Muslim Mughal emperors who ruled India for centuries.
Since Modi became prime minister, there’s also been a rise in lynchings of Muslims, often when they are accused of slaughtering cows, a practice that’s banned in much of the country because Hindus believe cows are sacred.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: A mob stormed into a Muslim family's home, dragged the father and son out by their hair, and started beating them with sticks and bricks on rumors they had eaten beef.
ARCHIVAL News Report: They're tied to a car. They're beaten with rods and lattes. Police does nothing.
And that means the threat of violence hangs over India’s Muslims, whether they are eating meat, going to a mosque, or just living their daily lives.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay: There's a constant dread, a friend of mine who's a Muslim, we were just talking. So he said that, look there's something very peculiar, which happens to me, that if I'm traveling in a public transport, and my cell phone rings, and the person on the other side comes out with an Islamic greeting, how do I respond?
Do I do it in a similar Islamic way and reveal my religious identity to the 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 people who are around you? Do I start whispering, which is going to raise suspicions? Why am I whispering on the phone? There is a sense of being unsettled. Things which were very standard are no longer standard any longer.
But for all the people who disapprove of Modi’s vision for a more Hindu-centric India, there are many, many more Indians who share it.
Bharat Barai: He is a natural leader. And I think it is good for India's fortune that he has become a politician.
Dr. Bharat Barai met Modi 30 years ago, back when Modi was a penniless member of the BJP party who had come to Chicago to attend a celebration of a Hindu philosopher. Modi needed a place to stay.
Bharat Barai: You know when they are party workers, they don't have the money to stay in Ritz Carlton or hire taxis. So, he stayed with us for approximately 10 days, and we used to have very good discussions in the morning as well as in the evening. And then he became Chief Minister of Gujarat. And then we used to visit him.
Peter Bergen: What struck you about him when you first met him?
Bharat Barai: His simplicity. He told my wife that I'll come with only one suitcase and two pairs of clothes. And I could see that he had only one 22-inch suitcase with him.
Even as a low-ranking party worker, Modi seemed well-versed in Indian political and social issues.
Bharat Barai: And he will offer his solutions. I mean, a lot of people complain about a lot of things. That's very common. But what struck me here was not only he knew about India's problems, but he has his own suggestion how they can be solved. And a couple of times I noticed, he had tears in his eyes that what is happening to this country, why it cannot be one of the developed countries. And this is when Peter, he had no other position except a party worker.
So, Dr. Barai started advocating for Modi to be granted a visa. And in 2014, Dr. Barai attended a dinner with President Barack Obama, and when he got his five minutes to speak with the president, he raised the issue of Modi's visa.
Baharat Barai: I told President that how are you going to keep great relations with India that you envision, when the person who is likely to become Prime Minister of India in next month's election does not even have visa to come to United States.
And he said, ‘Doctor, I did not know about it.’ At the end of the meeting, he pulled me on the side he said ‘somebody from State Department or White House will be in touch with you to get more details and this is not right and I'll fix it.’
Later that year, Modi was allowed to come to the US, and Dr. Barai was among the Indian-Americans who organized a massive welcome event for him at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.
(ambient sound from Madison Square Garden event, cheers)
But it's not just the roar of the crowd that Dr. Barai remembers. It's a moment in the green room before Modi went on stage. A man named Amitabh asked if Modi could speak on the phone with his uncle, who was too sick to attend the event in person.
Baharat Barai: The nephew could not believe that Prime Minister of India was talking to his uncle, and he broke down. He started crying, and Prime Minister Modi was talking with iPhone and Amitabh put his head right in his lap.
I didn't expect that Amitabh will put his head into lap of Prime Minister Modi. I would have thought that the Secret Service will jump in and say, you know, move away, move away. Amitabh was crying like a child out of happiness and was comforting him. It was a very touching scene to me.
Dr. Barai is an unapologetic Modi supporter. And in his view, criticism about the mistreatment of Muslims in Modi’s India is overblown. He says that if anything the Muslim population is just losing the special treatment it once enjoyed under previous administrations, which depended on their votes.
Baharat Barai: They were like a spoiled child. Whatever they wanted, they will go to the leadership of Congress Party and it will grant them. Tell me which benefit that Hindus have, Muslims don't have. They have the same bank account, they get the same water in their houses, they get the same electricity in their houses, they get the same free rations based on their income. I think this is all propaganda against Modi.
To Dr. Barai, Modi is still at his core, that humble man with just two sets of clothes who came to visit him three decades ago. Years later on the day that Dr. Barai’s father passed away, he got word that Modi had asked his staff not once but three times if his condolence message had made it.
Bharat Barai: It's a terrible event in your life, losing your father, and when the Prime Minister goes out of the way to console you. I have same kind of feeling when I saw Amitabh in his lap and crying. And he has shown this kind of touch at many other places that I know, with little children or elderly women. Those people who built the Ayodhya temple, all the workers, you know, ordinary workers, he served meals to them. Some of the lower class people who had done that, he washed their feet. Which president or prime minister or king does that?
Ravi Agrawal also got to be in the room with Modi back when he was a producer for CNN. Modi was doing an interview with CNN host Fareed Zakaria.
ARCHIVAL Fareed Zakaria: Prime Minister. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you.
Ravi Agrawal: Having produced many interviews with many world leaders, the male ones hate having makeup put on. Modi loved it. He wanted more makeup put on. This is a man who truly understands the power of image, who understands the power of marketing. He is easily the most PR-savvy world leader I have met and seen. And I've met quite a few.
He actually asked, uh, me and another producer about the cameraman and the camera angles. He was very curious about how we were going to cut it. And this wasn't a an idle curiosity. He genuinely wanted to know how his image would be projected on the screen and around the world. He is charismatic.
Peter Bergen: What does that mean in practice?
Ravi Agrawal: He knows how to win people over. He had looked at the list of people who were coming in for this shoot, including cameramen and an intern, and he knew everyone's name.
Peter Bergen: Wow.
Ravi Agrawal: And this was a group of journalists, all of whom had written and produced stories about him that were not what he would have liked. He would have known that. Yet he wanted to try and win us over. It was classic politician in that sense.
And everyone we spoke to, even his critics, said that Modi is an exceptional orator. If you’re not a Hindi speaker it’s hard to appreciate this.
Ravi Agrawal: He is able to understand the importance of cadence and pauses.
ARCHIVAL Modi: (speaking in Hindi)
Ravi Agrawal: He's able to understand wordplay in a way that, for example, Barack Obama was very good at — knowing when to pause, knowing when to project, knowing when to allow the rhythm of words to sort of cascade over each other.
Good orators understand the power of storytelling. They understand how to create a narrative that regular people can believe in, can buy into, can be inspired by. I think Modi, for all the criticisms of him, and I have many criticisms of him — he is hurting India's secular nature, he has got this clear authoritarian bent — but for all of that, he is able to tap into an aspect of Indian society and a yearning to be bigger, to be better. He is able to specifically make Hindus feel proud. He is able to riff on their cultural history and religious references that they all use and deploy at home, but have usually been scrubbed out of political discourse and are usually scrubbed out of discourse in English when you write and talk about India, he's been able to revive all of that. And I don't think India has ever had a leader who's leaned into that ability the way Modi has.
Peter Bergen: We're in the middle of the biggest election in human history. What does that look like on the ground?
Ravi Agrawal: Oh, it's spectacular. Indian elections are just really huge and enormous beyond anything anyone can comprehend. I mean this is a country of 1.4 billion people. More than 960 million Indians are eligible to vote this year. 960 million, by the way, is more than the combined populations of, let me see, America, Indonesia, add in a whole bunch of European countries — the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and probably still not at the population of Indians who are eligible.
Peter Bergen: Why is he so popular? I mean, his ratings are in the upper 70s.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has yet again emerged as the most popular leader in the world. The Prime Minister has retained his position with an approval rating of 76%.
Ravi Agrawal: It's very rare for an incumbent leader to have the popularity ratings that someone like Modi does. There are quite a few reasons. One could be that there aren't any true rivals to Modi within his party, or in the opposition.
Modi's also, I think, very successfully deployed subsidies, you can call it a form of new welfarism where he's really focused on delivering, for example, uh, a hundred million toilets to improve hygiene, especially in rural parts of India. (70)
In the 10 years that he's been in power, electricity connections have grown by 45%, which is a huge amount. Modi has also really tried to advance the opening of bank accounts, of gas connections. This also makes him very popular among women, for example. Whether it always works, that's less clear, but he's very good at marketing a lot of these initiatives that he sort of names in a grand way: Clean India, Digital India, Make in India.
In August, India even put a spacecraft on the Moon, joining an elite club of countries capable of lunar travel.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: (applause) I think they've done it!
Newscaster 2: Oh, wow. an extraordinary moment, India has made history by becoming the first nation to land near the moon's South Pole.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: India’s prime minister Narendra Modi watched alongside the team at the Indian Space Research Organization as the Chandra…
Modi gave rare comments in English celebrating this great victory.
ARCHIVAL Narendra Modi: This success belongs to all of humanity.
At the same time that Modi has done much for ordinary Indians and also shown the world that India is a great power, Modi has also made sure there's very little counter-narrative available from Indian media.
Ravi Agrawal: Through controlling the media, he's been able to convert most Indians into not even knowing when he's misstepped. He's been able to build a constantly positive narrative about him and his accomplishments that is just unvarnished by counter realities. That is something that I think people in the West don't always understand or acknowledge.
Peter Bergen: How has Modi adapted to the environment where suddenly, where very few people have been online, a lot of people are now online?
Ravi Agrawal: He has thrived in that environment. He loves one-way communication, for example, where he can broadcast to a very large group of people nationally. He is one of the most followed people on social media.This is a person who does not like independent journalism. Prime Minister Modi is probably the only Indian prime minister in history who has not given an open press conference.
He does not like open questions. The media ecosystem in India has weakened considerably since 2014 when Modi came to power. Media freedom has declined. A lot of the big newspapers and TV channels are owned by big businessmen who are close to Modi. So the media climate has deteriorated.
(Music)
Peter Bergen: India's fought three major wars against its neighbor, Pakistan. But this time around, if there was a war, both sides have nuclear weapons and they both have, I think, quite immature, nuclear doctrine, maybe similar to what the United States and the Soviets had in the fifties. So, is the possibility of a conflict with Pakistan going up?
Ravi Agrawal: Potentially, and not only with Pakistan now, but also with China. Indians are more jingoistic, more prideful of their place in the world than they have ever been. And that sort of has a tail wagging the dog kind of impact at times where you can imagine if India were to have another skirmish with Pakistan, an aerial dogfight, or another scuffle on the border with China. How would India react? How would its people force it to react?
And along with its Muslim community, India’s Sikh community — with a population of around 24 million — has also been attacked. Both domestically and abroad.
Ravi Agrawal: Last year, Canada came out and accused India of assassinating a Canadian citizen, a Sikh person, on Canadian soil.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The killing of a Sikh activist in British Columbia has opened up a diplomatic rift between India and Canada. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says India may have been involved, a charge New Delhi is calling absurd.
Ravi Agrawal: This was a person that India alleged, had declared, to be a terrorist. Now, India claims that it did not assassinate this person and it did not pay anyone to assassinate this person, but there was a general mood in the country that, yeah, we didn't do it. But if we did, we did the right thing. And that's fairly new.
Peter Bergen: And of course, there's also an allegation that they were going to mount a similar plot against a Sikh leader in the United States.
Ravi Agrawal: That is correct. This was foiled. India responded to the public revelation about the foiled plot differently. And this is because this is America. America is much bigger and much more powerful than Canada and must be responded to differently. There was also a lot of evidence that was made public. But what India ended up saying was, we respect your findings and we will look into this. So the reaction was very much, you know, we don't want to rock the boat in this particular relationship. And I think America also has realized it doesn't want to rock the boat.
Dr. Barai warns that the United States would be wise to keep the boat steady — and keep everyone on board.
Bharat Barai: Don't try to push India in a corner. A, it's the largest populated country in the world. Geographically, it is located next to Russia and China. And you don't want to antagonize them so much beyond a reasonable limit that they feel more comfortable with Russia and China than they feel comfortable with United States. We don't want India to be with Putin. Okay, there’s 2 percent things you may not like, but what is in the best interest of the world?
In the end, Modi the man is representative of a much larger movement in a country that overwhelmingly supports him and is very likely to reelect him in June.
Ravi Agrawal: I actually have begun to believe that India itself is changing. That young Indians more and more, they like what Modi has to offer. They like the pro-Hindu, Hindi-speaking India that he's espousing. They love the Hindu revivalism and the pride that he has instilled in them and that India's illiberal moment may not have just begun. This may be much more than a blip. This could be enduring for quite a while.
If you are interested in learning more about the issues and stories we discussed in this episode, we recommend Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay and The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani and also his book Incarnations: India in Fifty Lives. That last book is available on Audible. We also recommend Ravi Agrawal’s podcast, FP Live.
CREDITS
In the Room with Peter Bergen is an Audible Original, produced by Audible Studios and Fresh Produce Media.
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Copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC.
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Please note: This episode includes excerpts from news coverage from India Today, The Wire, TRT World, Times Now, PMO India, WION, Sky News, and the BBC’s documentary India: The Modi Question.
