2014: The Election That Changed India (35 page)

Rajat Sharma was one such individual. Rajat was one
of the original print journalists to switch to television in the early 1990s. He had built his
reputation through the programme
Aap ki Adalat
on Zee TV. Designed in a courtroom format,
the programme had Rajat play prosecutor with the guest being placed in the confession box before a
judge and an audience. By 2004, Rajat had started his own Hindi television channel, India TV, and
had become a successful entrepreneur. His channel was now housed in a rather Bollywood-style
palatial three-floor building on the Noida highway.

Before plunging into journalism, Rajat had been an
activist of the ABVP, the students’ wing of the BJP, in the 1970s. He had even been arrested
for eleven months in the anti-Emergency movement. That’s when he got to know Modi who was then
a young RSS pracharak. Their common friend was Jaitley, another rising star in the student
politics of the 1970s. Jaitley would become president of the Delhi University
students’ union; Sharma became general secretary.

The Modi–Rajat bond would survive the test of
time. ‘Modi would come to our house for simple vegetarian food when he was in Delhi in the
1990s. I guess we hit it off well right from the beginning,’ reminisces Rajat. When Modi was
sworn in as Gujarat chief minister in December 2002 after the riots, he invited Rajat to be his
special guest. ‘I was reluctant as a journalist to be seen on stage with Modi, but he was
insistent. He said that I was being invited as a friend, not as a journalist,’ he told me.

Rajat was fondly referred to as
‘Panditji’ by Modi. So when he approached Modi for an interview soon after he became the
BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in September 2013, the response was positive. ‘I will
do it, I promise, Panditji, but let us wait for the right time,’ he’d told Rajat.

The ‘right time’ was originally meant to
be just before the election campaign really took off in March. But caught in the whirl of ticket
distribution and rallies across the country, Modi kept delaying the interview. Finally, 12 April
2014 was fixed as the date. It was perfect timing. The first two rounds of the voting were just
over, and the election was about to enter the critical phases across much of north India.
Aap ki
Adalat
was the ideal platform. It was Hindi news TV’s longest running show, with a loyal
viewership. And the host was someone with whom Modi had a high degree of comfort.

The interview almost didn’t happen on the day.
Modi had been relentlessly campaigning that day across Bihar and Bengal, and had addressed half a
dozen rallies. He had promised Rajat he would fly down to Delhi after the rallies were over and
drive straight to the India TV studios, at least a ninety-minute drive from the airport. When Modi
finally arrived, it was 10.45 p.m. and he was totally exhausted. His throat was hurting and he was
struggling to speak. ‘We told him to rest a bit, hoping that he would feel better. We even
offered him some food but he said he was observing Navaratra so would only drink water,’
recalls Rajat. For the next hour, Modi rested with a flask of warm water by his side.
‘Panditji, programme

karte hain, lekin fifteen
to twenty minutes ke liye, usse zyada karna muskhil hoga’
(I will do the programme, but
only for fifteen to twenty minutes—more than that will be tough), a tired Modi told Rajat.

All that changed the moment Modi entered the studio
in his blue jacket kurta. As soon as Rajat called out his name, the studio audience went wild. They
began chanting his name in a crazed manner. One of the girls even shouted, ‘Modi, I love
you!’, at which the prime ministerial candidate burst out laughing. Says Rajat, ‘I had
done hundreds of
Aap ki Adalat
s but had never seen anything remotely like this. Even film
stars like Salman and Shahrukh had not got this kind of a frenzied response.’

The audience was predominantly north Indian urban
middle class—housewives and college students, government clerks and traders. It was just the
kind of urban constituency that was driving the Modi juggernaut. ‘We had asked all our staff
members to bring their friends and relatives because we knew the programme would start late and we
needed the audience to stay till it was over,’ says Rajat.

Modi was transformed once the cameras turned on. The
palpable adulation of the audience was his tonic and the long day on the campaign trail was
forgotten. He was now Modi, the consummate stage performer, acting before an adoring audience. This
is what he had learnt in his early days of theatre in Vadnagar—gauging the mood of the
audience, knowing when to raise them to a fever pitch, when to dissolve them into laughter. Modi
understands all this well and plays an audience like a conductor leads an orchestra.

He was serious and witty in equal measure. The
one-liners just kept coming. When Rajat asked why he didn’t wear a topi offered to him by a
Muslim religious leader, Modi shot back, ‘Have you ever seen Gandhi and Sardar wear a
topi?’ When asked about his anti-minority image, he claimed, ‘I want Muslims to have a
Koran in one hand and a computer in another.’ When told that Azam Khan, the SP leader, had
called him the ‘elder brother of puppies’, he replied, ‘I say thank you very much
because the loyalty of dogs is unparalleled.’

Every answer was met with
rapturous applause and loud cries of ‘Modi, Modi!’ For a viewer, it seemed as though one
had been transported to a BJP rally. This was a master communicator in total command, pulling off
yet another virtuoso solo act. The recording went on for almost ninety minutes, finishing after 1.15
a.m. The entire crew and audience now wanted ‘selfies’ with their hero!

Next Thursday, the TRP figures were out.
Modi’s show, aired on a Saturday night at 10 p.m., was by far the number one show, getting
almost 70 per cent audience share. ‘We were stunned with the numbers. It was by far the
highest we had got for any
Aap Ki Adalat
programme,’ says Rajat.

At the same time the Modi programme was playing out,
Aaj Tak, the leading Hindi news channel, was airing a Rahul Gandhi interview. It barely registered
on the TRP meter. The Modi interview had 7 million views on YouTube by the time the elections were
over. It was repeated seven times (often just before a major election day) and the viewership kept
soaring.

And yet, there was a question mark over whether the
interview had been stage-managed. Rajat insists that he asked Modi all the hard questions and the
audience wasn’t tutored to cheer for the BJP’s prime ministerial nominee. ‘The
fact is Modi is simply the finest political communicator I have seen since Vajpayee. He knew how to
reach out to an audience, it was all spontaneous,’ he says.

But the India TV editorial director Qamar Waheed
Naqvi did not agree. The morning after the show was telecast, he resigned. ‘The entire
programme was part of the Modi propaganda machine. No hard questions were asked and the audience was
full of Modi
bhakt
s who were only there to cheer for him,’ he told me later.

Rajat denies the accusations, saying Naqvi was fully
aware of the programme content and had actually praised it after it was recorded. ‘I think the
AAP members got to Naqvi and forced him to resign, and tried to make a political issue out of
it,’ he claims. Rajat’s proximity to Modi meant that his neutrality would always be
questioned by his critics. But it’s also true that lines are often crossed when a journalist
gets too close to a politician.

Whatever the truth, the fact
is the interview was a blockbuster. If the Rahul interview forced the Congress leader to retreat,
Modi’s India TV programme only added to the aura around him. Over the next twenty-eight
days—between 12 April and 10 May—Modi did almost fifty print and television interviews.
It was almost as if he now felt ‘liberated’ from the self-imposed cage in which he had
locked himself over the last five years.

The media blitz was well choreographed. Modi would
do his interviews almost in tune with the election calendar. So, for example, he did an interview
with the news agency ANI just a day before the crucial phase five of the elections. Campaigning had
ended in 121 seats in twelve states, but Modi knew the interview would be carried across all the
channels which subscribed to the agency just ahead of the polling. When Tamil Nadu was going to the
polls, he spoke to Tamil channels; when Bengal was going to elections, the preference was for
regional Bengali channels; and when his home state of Gujarat was polling, Gujarati news channels
were targeted. ‘Narendrabhai knew the power of regional networks and actually told us he would
prefer speaking to them,’ is how a Team Modi member put it to me.

His energy was boundless. He would do the interviews
at his Gandhinagar residence either before he set off on the campaign trail at 9 a.m. or after he
had returned well past 10 p.m. Modi had always loved the camera; now he wanted to make up, it
appears, for the lost years, when he had consciously stayed away from it.

The scheduling of the interviews was left to a small
group of officials, mainly from the Gujarat government. Modi didn’t have, contrary to popular
belief, a highly qualified team of external professional media advisers. His PRO, Jagdish Thakkar,
for example, was from the state information department and had been with the Gujarat chief
minister’s office since 1989 (he would later move with Modi to the PMO). Whenever I’d
phone Jagdishbhai seeking time for an interview, he’d talk to me about my father’s
batting instead. ‘Oh, what a batsman Dilip Sardesai was!’ he’d say, fobbing me
off. I told him that much as I liked hearing praise of my father’s cricketing
skills, I’d feel even better once I had got my Modi interview.

I did not get the interview, though Modi had
promised me one and had even said no questions were taboo (‘
Arre, tumse koi dushmani nahi,
Rajdeep
’—I have no enmity with you), but at least my network did get more than one.
The only major news network that wasn’t given an interview was NDTV. Modi, it seems, still
hadn’t forgiven or forgotten the reporting done by the NDTV channels (yours truly included)
during the Gujarat riots and its aftermath. In fact, during a Network 18 event in 2013, Modi made a
snide remark that NDTV’s ‘Save the Tiger’ effort got sponsorship because
‘the tiger was secular and maybe the lion was seen as communal’. The BJP members in the
audience laughed; I thought the remark was in rather poor taste.

Indeed, some things did not change even as Modi
tried to appear more conciliatory towards the media. Whenever an interviewer asked a tough question
(but very few did), you sensed a certain frostiness return to Modi’s eyes. It happened when he
was asked a question about his wife Jasodhaben and when an interviewer tried to push him once again
on the riots. He chose to describe any criticism as being the handiwork of ‘news
traders’, a rather unfortunate and ominous term that sadly no interviewer dared challenge. It
was as if Modi had mentally divided journalists into camps and was urging his supporters to see any
criticism of him as ‘paid media’, another regrettable term designed to put even
professional journalists on the defensive.

The truth is, Modi was in full control. He was
setting the terms of engagement with the news media and relishing the challenge. Most journalists
were just grateful for the limited access and happy to be co-opted. A charismatic speaker, Modi
knows what will ‘sell’ with the viewers and what won’t. His ear for a good slogan
or a line rarely fails him. While a Rahul Gandhi dithered after his initial faux pas, Modi was on a
roll. Body language is also a potent communicator. A burly swagger compared with cutesy hand-waving
became the default TV split screen for the Modi–Rahul personality clash. Modi on stage is a
domineering figure with not a trace of tentativeness; Rahul, by contrast, looks like a shy schoolboy
pushed into a dramatics class.

As one political observer put
it, ‘A doctorate in communication was being pitted against someone still in
kindergarten!’ It was a no contest. The prime-time battle had been settled.

Every night on television screens across the
country, you have a live courtroom drama with news anchors sometimes playing judge, jury and
prosecutor, and ‘guilty till proven innocent’ being the presiding mantra. Familiar
talking heads pop out of every debate, often swiftly moving from one channel to another. Studio
‘talk’ is cheap; solid ground reporting needs deep pockets. Journalistic laziness and a
warped business model have ensured that loud and highly opinionated court martials have become a
staple diet on news channels. It is often rather inane, high on noise and low on substance, but it
is a rough democracy of opinion. The debate is robust, if not always constructive, and can
nevertheless be entertaining.

Election time is no different. Every political party
has to line up party spokespersons to defend their position. Here again, the battle was unequal. The
BJP had a strong line-up of articulate, TV-savvy leaders; the Congress’s best did not want to
go out and face the bouncers being thrown at them by aggressive anchors.