Namo, Nemo, and other stories

BY Rajdeep Sardesai| IN Books | 05/11/2014

Excerpted with permission of Rajdeep Sardesai and Penguin Books India from   2014: The Election That Changed India (Penguin) 400 pages, Rs. 599

For Modi, the media is important yet untrustworthy, an ally for publicity, an adversary on issues. It is his intimate enemy—he grudgingly relies on it for feedback but scorns it when it acts as a mirror or sounding board. If he was to open up ahead of the biggest election in his life, it would be to someone he fully trusted.

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.

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In June 2013, Ajay Maken was put in charge of the Congress’s communication department. Maken had proved to be an enthusiastic sports minister, and the party was hoping he would bring some of that energy to this key post ahead of the elections. His predecessor, Janardhan Dwivedi, was an old-world neta who preferred poetry to sound bites. I got the feeling that he was part of that frustrated group within the Congress who actually derived vicarious pleasure from seeing the government embarrassed. Congress gossip was that Dwivedi had been given the job because he had taught Hindi to Sonia Gandhi!

Maken’s first task was to try and ensure that the Congress got its most eloquent voices to speak up for the party. His team prepared an exhaustive list of leaders to appear on television. But as a Maken aide put it, ‘It was a thankless task. None of our major leaders who were now ministers wanted to come on TV debates.’ I asked one of the ministers what the reason was. He said, ‘Why should we come on a cockfight on television and make a fool of ourselves!’

Some Congress ministers like Anand Sharma made it clear to Maken that they would only appear in occasional one-on-one interviews. ‘You don’t expect us to be on the same debate as some junior spokesperson of the BJP,’ Sharma said, somewhat dismissively. Even Manish Tewari, who was once their main pugilist on television, was now an information and broadcasting minister. ‘I am now part of the government, so I can’t speak freely on every issue,’ was his explanation.It was a familiar excuse. The UPA government wasn’t short of effective speakers. Individuals like Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot would have made a formidable communication team. But they shunned the media like wounded lions, with barely concealed rage, believing that 24/7 news was responsible for most of the UPA’s misfortunes. 

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Modi has always liked technology as much as he likes wearing designer kurtas. He had started his website back in 2002 when few politicians even glanced at the Internet. An old Modi associate recalls how the seasoned politician was almost childlike when he was gifted an electronic diary once. ‘He just likes to play around with some new tech device. He may not have the time to learn it always, but he just likes to be seen with it,’ is how the friend describes Modi’s tech-savvy avatar.

Modi was also aware of what was being tweeted about him. Once during a phone conversation, he suddenly said, ‘Arre, tum aur tumhari biwi aaj kal bahut Twitter pe ho!’ (You and your wife are on Twitter a lot). Sagarika had just tweeted about how Modi should have acknowledged his wife Jasodhaben much earlier. Without mentioning the specific tweet, Modi had sent out the message he wanted to. Even if Modi didn’t look closely at his tweets, his team and followers certainly did. If the Gandhi family had their political chamchas, Modi had his ‘Internet Hindus’ (or bhakts, as I called them). I often found myself facing the ire of what appeared as an organized, systematic campaign of hate and abuse against anyone who didn’t follow the prescribed narrative. Their social media profile usually was ‘Proud Hindu nationalist. Want Namo for PM.’ Internet Hindus are highly organized and motivated, and demolishing the narratives and reputations of mainstream media practitioners is their avowed objective.

My worst moment with this group came when I tweeted, ‘While NaMo travels the country, my Nemo needs to be taken for a walk in the park. Different folks, different priorities!’ It was an innocuous, if perhaps ill-advised attempt at wordplay—my beagle Nemo had been named after my daughter Tarini’s favourite movie, Finding Nemo. The bhakts were unimpressed and let off a volley of abuse on social media. A few hours later, I got a threatening phone call. ‘You have likened our leader to a dog. You and your family will pay for this. We will cut you into pieces.’

(Extracts  from Chapter 7, Multimedia Is the Message)