Modi and The Media

Looking in from the outside, most observers came to the conclusion that Team Modi had very little to complain about in the way the campaign was being covered… Rahul Kanwal, who covered the election for Headlines Today, agreed that Modi constantly gave journalists what they wanted most: stories. ‘He is brilliant copy. He’s the best copy India has ever had.’

Almost everything he did made news: the tea stalls, the holograms, the mammoth open-air rallies. For Kanwal, as a television journalist, Modi was a dream. ‘When he is speaking, he is the director, the producer, the editor, the copywriter, the actor, the superstar, all in the same person. Because when he is speaking you see, when he wants the crowd to respond to what he is saying, he turns the mic towards them. So he is very theatrical, very Bollywood in that sense. He has a better sense of occasion, of timing, of television, of cameras, of production than virtually anybody else. He is smarter when it comes to production than most TV producers.’ And if that includes speaking over the heads of the journalists, through social media or at public rallies, ‘It’s not something that you like, but what option do you have? He functions in the way that he does. You can’t change it. You can clamour as much as you want, you can crib as much as you want, he’s not going to change.’ Aatish Srivastava, who covered the BJP for the NewsX channel, concurred. ‘Suddenly the media, which was dead against him, realised that he is going to be the Prime Minister of the country.’ And some journalists were prepared to admit that there were other constraints on what they could write. ‘We are all corporate-run media houses now. There is no one who is doing it as a social service,’ said one.

The ‘3D Rallies’... Playing God

The rallies proved so popular that local campaign teams started to inundate the war room with requests to be included. The number and frequency of the rallies was increased, putting yet more strain on the logistics. In rural areas lorries would get stuck on muddy roads, loose electrical wires would prevent the tall trucks from passing and trees would obstruct the route. But there was an almost over- whelming demand from the public to be met – so much so that one afternoon an organiser rang the central controllers in fear. One of the trucks carrying power equipment was still a hundred kilometres away and he told them, ‘These village people are saying they will not let me go if a 3D rally doesn’t happen here today’. The situation was resolved at the last minute and Modi made a point of name-checking the village so his volunteer could sleep easy that night.

The appeal of the holograms is not hard to fathom. They were pure spectacle, bringing a touch of glamour to places that were often far from a cinema and where perhaps only a few – if any – of the villagers had access to a television. But the BJP’s official spokesman during the campaign, Prakash Javadekar, suggested that it wasn’t just the element of extravaganza that caught the people’s imagination. Modi was close to becoming deified. ‘In Hindu mythology,’ he told me, ‘like in other religions, God is omnipresent. If you are a believer, you believe God is everywhere. So, Modi is addressing them from a different place but he is there. Thousands were listening and people could photograph themselves with him. The photograph would also have Modi in the picture. So it was a big hit, especially in the rural areas.’ Were the people looking for another God? I asked him. He hesitated briefly. ‘Another hero.’

(Lance Price is a British writer, journalist and political commentator who has authored four books.)