Rajdeep Sardesai: I have never been anti-Modi Rajdeep Sardesai, 49, has been a journalist for 26 years, and has worked with the Times of India and NDTV, before setting up the IBN 18 network. He is currently consulting editor of the India Today group. A graduate of St Xaviers college, Mumbai, where he studied economics, and Oxford University where he studied law, Rajdeep has specialised in national politics over an extended period of time. He has also been a former president of the Editors Guild of India. In personal interactions he is so amenable that he gets away with many controversies. Son of the cricket legend Dilip Sardesai, he is now trying to hit a six in his maiden attempt at writing a book. On the eve of the release of his book, 2014: The Election That Changed India, Rajdeep, image, above, spoke candidly in an interview with Sheela Bhatt/Rediff. Which are the personal qualities of Modi, the man you saw in 99-98, that have brought him here? I think he is remarkably focused. Others had distractions. Pramod Mahajan had his own distractions, and Govindacharya was so caught up in ideologies. Modi is not even an ideologue. See, luck is also there, 2001 was the year of earthquake in Gujarat, else Keshubhai Patel would not have been under the pressure he was, maybe Delhi would not have replaced Keshubhai with Modi. So luck always plays a role in politics. Is Modi more hype or more substance? There is no doubt hype is there because Modi is such a new phenomenon and is an outsider who has come in. So naturally there is hype. And then he is a terrific communicator so he is able to dominate the narrative or discourse so there is hype. But to say there is no substance will also be unfair. Let’s be clear, Modi has run Gujarat for 12 years. The glass is half full and half empty. Jyotigram is such a success story. I have spoken to a few Gujarat bureaucrats and they say Modi has out of the box ideas. So there is both substance and hype. But Modi should not become a victim of his own hype. Modi should realise, and he is clever enough to realise, that hype alone will not make him PM for 10 years. He will have to do a few things with substance also. So Swachch Bharat cannot just become a photo op. Modi’s challenge is to rise above the hype. I personally, grudgingly, will admit that Modi is far cleverer than what I thought nine-10 years ago. I remember Modi from the 1990s, at that time I thought Pramod Mahajan was the cleverest of them all. If I was asked in 1998 and we did a poll on who would be the future leader, I thought Mahajan would be the future leader of the BJP. Because he was very strategic at that time and Narendrabhai was very low profile. Even if you wanted to understand what was happening, you turned to Govindacharya, not to Modi. Will Modi deliver? I would say that I sense Modi is here to stay for 10 years. Because he has understood what it takes to win elections. But after that the jury is out. I am at the moment only willing to say that he has 10 years to deliver. But whether he will deliver in those 10 years, I think that is a question mark. He says, on corruption, I will neither take bribes nor allow you to take bribes. Are you still going to be able to manage without paying hafta to some police-wallah or income tax person? How is Modi going to achieve that? I have said in my epilogue that I’m not convinced Modi is an instinctive reformer. Modi is not a natural reformer, he is into “reform himself”. ‘I’m the reform’. He is not trying to reform institutions. I think he has an opportunity because this kind of mandate gives you opportunity. But whether he will deliver or not, I’m not so sure. Do you think Amit Shah and Modi are on the same page on the management of the party and the government? I think they are on the same page. I think Amit Shah is around 14 years younger to Modi. Shah is 50 and Modi is 64. And I think Amit Shah realises that he is very much the junior partner. Indians like jodis and this is Jodi Number 1 in which Amit Shah has a role to play and Modi has a role to play. Amit Shah will be seen as the person who has to drive the party’s election strategy in state after state. He is the person who has to ensure that the cadres and organisations are enthused about ideology, that the organisation doesn’t become de-ideologised. Modi will play the statesman, the governance guru. Modi and Amit Shah have their roles cut out. Ten years from now, Modi will be 74 and Amit will be 60, then we will have to see what role they want to play for each other. At the moment they are playing their roles and there is no moment of tension. The issue of dynastic politics is quite under discussion and you have understood the Congress as well as the BJP. In the book you have written how the Congress failed to pick up its guns to fight these elections with a robust strategy. What is the way out for the Congress? This book is as much about the Congress’s failure as about the BJP’s success. This question is more difficult than, can Modi deliver? Because I feel the Congress cannot survive right now without the dynasty. It is part of their system. What the Congress or Rahul Gandhi can do is to become an intelligent family company and appoint very strong CEOs. To appoint very strong CEOs in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra -- states where the Congress need to recover if it wants to have any hope. But if you continue to remain chairman of the company, concentrate power in yourself and are unable to find strong CEOs, then the Congress has a death wish. So the Congress will have to go back to the pre-1967 era. Before Indira, when Congress had strong state chiefs. Is the Congress willing to do that? The Congress saw a glimpse of that with Sachin Pilot in Rajasthan. Tell Sachin Pilot you have to stay in Jaipur for the next five years and you have to drive the party there. Tell Jyotiraditya Scindia please don’t stay in Delhi, for five years I only want to see you in Bhopal. Tell Priyanka Gandhi, I want you to be in Uttar Pradesh, for five years you stay in Lucknow. Or you yourself go there and stay for five years in Lucknow. That, according to me, is the only hope for this party. It cannot be run from Delhi. Dynasty might be there. That is the Congress’s prerogative. How much blame should go to Sonia Gandhi for the Congress’s failure in 2014 and for Modi’s success? Sheela, I write in my book that I think the Congress lost this election in 2011. That was the horrible year for the Congress -- the year of Anna (Hazare). In my view that was the year the Congress should have seen the writing on the wall, in my view that was the year Manmohan Singh should have stepped down, because I think that time he had lost interest and become tired, he was not well. That was the year the Congress should have effected change. The only person who could have effected the change was Sonia Gandhi. Sonia Gandhi failed in 2011 because she is a status quoist. Had she rocked the boat in 2011, there could have been some challenge to Modi in 2014. How can the Congress redefine itself? I said the Congress has to redefine itself by decentralising itself. What about the issue of secularism? I think the Congress has boxed itself into a corner where secularism for them is Muslim politics. That cannot be the future. Where the only community you are targeting are the Muslims. The only group that voted more for the Congress than the BJP is the Muslims. Dalits didn’t vote for you, tribals didn’t, and you claim you are a pro-poor party. But the poorest of the people did not vote for you. So the Congress has to go back to redefining itself not in terms of secularism vs communalism, but it has to go back to define itself as a mass-based party. The problem is the Congress has become a drawing room party. Do you think the coalition era is ending and the regional parties will be wiped out? I think regional parties in the form that they are running in are in big trouble. I like what Shivanand Tiwari said in an Indian Express article. This Tughlaqi style leadership of regional parties, which is whimsical, arbitrary, and family-oriented, dynastical, that is coming to an end. You also need to provide governance. You can’t run a regional party as your own personal freedom. And that is a challenge to all political parties. Why did you write this book? Are you in search of some identity which is different from what your identity was in television? I have always seen myself as a print journalist. I started off as a print journalist and I have always been excited by the idea of writing. I still get a great high by writing a column and reading the byline. I think it feels much better than doing a television programme. My initial idea was to write a book on the media. From media I shifted to Modi after I spent a lot of time on the 2014 campaign in my election trackers, reading material, talking to people. I made notes and very rigorously right through the trackers I would note down all the data. I was trying to understand this Modi phenomenon and I feel I was at an advantage because I had seen this for the last 20-25 years. So I was just trying to complete one chapter of my life. I met Modi in 1990 and it’s now 2014, so for the past 24 years Modi has been sometimes in my periphery and sometimes in my proximity as a journalist. And I feel maybe there was a book waiting to be written and I was very keen to write so it just happened. I remember telling Chiki Sarkar of Penguin that I will write it if Modi gets a majority. What has happened is a truly remarkable landmark election. Someone suggested to me to write the biography of Modi. I said I don’t know Modi well enough, plus Modi is a work in progress. And there are many of his biographies. Elections are something that have always interested me. I always wonder, what is it that makes one vote for a particular party? What is it that makes one small vendor vote for someone? I think as a journalist it is great to study the voter’s behaviour. So this book is not about Modi, he is just a central character. This book is about elections and what made India vote the way it did. Coming to your book, why do you say that the 2014 election is in the same league as 1952 and 1977? Because I’m very clear that 1952 was the first election and at that time most people thought India will break up. Then, they said this election is a terrible idea, it’s a gamble. But Jawaharlal Nehru succeeded so it was important to establish democracy through elections. In ’77, people thought democracy was once again finished in this country. It was important to reaffirm our faith in democracy. 2014 is in the same league because 2014 has seen the emergence of a majority non-Congress government really for the first time. When I say majority I mean single-party majority. In that sense it marks a break with the last 60 years. So I think the scale of the victory is unprecedented. In 1984, it was a sympathy wave election. 2014 needs a deeper explanation about how India has changed after 1947. There is a new India emerging. Why did India vote the way it voted? Is it because of Hindutva or development? I think primarily it is because of a certain degree of anger that has built up, particularly in the last five years, against the ruling alliance. People thought the Congress government was incompetent, people thought the Congress government had failed and there was so much of negativism. Modi’s biggest victory in a sense was being able to channelise this negativism into a positive vote for him. He became Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘I have got the muscle, I will change the India’. So I think there was that element. Hindutva was there in certain parts of India. There is no doubt in my mind that there was Hindu consolidation taking place, and there was this desire for better governance and faster development. So all three, Modi’s image, governance as well as Hindutva, along with as I said deep anger against the present government worked for the BJP. The main factor, without the anger, I don’t think Modi would’ve succeeded. I think Modi was one leader who was the right person at the right time in the right context. In any other context, I don’t think Modi would’ve succeeded. The context of anger and negativism, which we thought was his weakness, actually became his strengths. In normal times we would’ve thought Modi is a polarising figure and dividing people, etc. In fact L K Advani was apparently telling the BJP this, don’t make Modi a PM candidate because that’ll polarise Hindus and Muslims. But actually, in the times we were living in, Modi became a unifier. You know, Modi stands for governance, the same person who stood for polarising elections was now being projected as a governance icon and it worked because there was this anger. Did the media create the Modi wave? You have discussed this very interestingly in your book also. It would be wrong to say that the media created the Modi wave. The media, I believe, rode on the Modi wave. The Modi wave was there. See Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. There is less media penetration there compared to other states. The BJP swept those states. So there was a Modi wave being built up, there is no doubt about it. The media rode on it. The media was intelligent enough to realise that Modi has TRP or Modi is selling. Rahul is not selling. And we realised that last year itself, in 2013. So suddenly, Modi’s rally got covered live. Often two or three rallies live and Modi was also clever to realise what is prime time or Sundays. There is not much news on Sundays so let’s do our rallies on Sundays. Modi was also clever to know how to use the media. Modi used the media perfectly. And I find it interesting that at one level Modi has contempt for the media. But he knows how to use us also beautifully. He is a master of using the media and at the same time he is contemptuous of the media also. In your book you have shared insights you got as a top level editor in New Delhi. Tell me, you must have got the inside details of Modi’s execution of this winning track, what is really striking about it? Two or three things are striking. One, I did not know that Modi is such a good listener. Every young man who worked with Team Modi, I asked them what was it about Modi that is appealing. They say he is a very good listener. That, I didn’t know. Two, Modi empowers the young. I thought Modi keeps all power in himself but if he trusts you, he’s ready to delegate it to you. Modi is very good at delegating power to younger people or people outside politics. Modi’s problem is in delegating power or working with people who are within politics or are his peers. So he finds it easier to work with younger people who are technocrats. His technocrats were people who were given real power to execute. Whether it was Chai Pe Charcha, whether it was the 3D campaign, he trusted Prashant Kishor of Citizens for Accountable Governance. He gave them power. I always thought Modi kept everything to himself so I was quite struck by the fact that he was acting like a CEO.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 03:12:34 +0000
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