PM Narendra Modi's 20 Years At The Helm: A Ringside View From Gujarat To Delhi

Narendra Modi completes 20 years to the day in his role as a chief political executive, first as Chief Minister of Gujarat and then as Prime Minister of India. It is a rare milestone in the political career of any leader anywhere in the world. Vladimir Putin of Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey come to mind, but an important differentiator between them and Modi is that the Indian Prime Minister has won six democratic elections – each with a mandate larger than earlier one – in a polity as diverse, fractured, and multidirectional as India. 

Modi’s rise has been amid a 24/7 media glare, chronicled through millions of column inches of print in newspapers, billions of kilo bites on digital and television space, as also books subjecting his politics, motivations, comments, actions and governance to scrutiny. 

I began my career as a reporter on March 6, 2002, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. It was the first week of what was panning out as the Gujarat riots in the aftermath of the Sabarmati train carnage. The city and parts of the State had become a communal cauldron, and it was literally baptism by fire to go out and learn ropes of the profession of journalism. Modi had won his first election from Rajkot to become a member of the Gujarat Assembly only a week before, after having become Chief Minister of the State on October 7, 2001. The central leadership of the BJP had sent him to replace Keshu Bhai Patel on grounds of performance post the Kutch earthquake. On a couple of occasions in the past, Modi has expressed in interviews the pain he went through during those days. It culminated with the three-day Sadbhavana - harmony - fast in September 2011 by which he underscored the message of inclusivism in his politics and governance. 

(Narendra Modi's swearing-in as the Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001)

Since then, I have had a front row seat witnessing Modi’s evolution as a politician, as a leader, as an administrator, as a global statesman. One of the early governance initiatives of Modi was the reform of boards and corporations of the Gujarat government. I closely witnessed some of them by virtue of my posting in Vadodara where they were headquartered. The corporatisation and unbundling of the Gujarat Electricity Board (GEB) as part of power reforms showed early signs of Modi as a tough leader who could crack the whip against the Sarkari slack and blackmail of unionism. I was sitting in a meeting in which he took a zonal chief engineer to task for failing to control power theft in Saurashtra pocket, giving shivers to the bureaucrats. The message was clear. Shape up or ship out. He similarly reinvented the loss-making government companies Gujarat State Fertilizer Corporation (GSFC) and Gujarat Alkalies Corporation Limited (GACL) by directly negotiating with the trade unions, getting performance oriented no-nonsense bureaucrats to helm them, and turned them around into profit making star performers of the stock markets. 

There was another aspect of Modi the leader that was shaping up in those years - that of a social reformer. Addressing the convocation of M S University in 2003, he quoted Abraham Lincoln’s famous letter to his son’s teacher while asking young minds to nurture ambition beyond government jobs. I found the Lincoln connection to an RSS pracharak politician interesting and mentioned it in my copy. In 2006, there was an event at the Palanpur dairy plant in North Gujarat. Modi realised his predominantly rural and women audience and gave an emotional speech on the scourge of female foeticide. I was present in the crowd and could see the women sobbing. Again, an example of a leader who knew his constituency, and connected with the grassroots. This would go on to reflect in PM’s first Independence Day speech from the Red Fort when in 2014 he exhorted parents to be tough on their sons by asking them same questions as they would ask of daughters while going out late if they wanted to prevent societal ills like rape. 

(Then Chief Minister Narendra Modi interacting with school-children in Gujarat)

In the summer months just ahead of monsoon, CM Modi would travel through the rural hinterland educating farmers about modern agriculture and best practices under his flagship ‘Krishi Rath’ project. Some kits would be distributed including seeds, fertilizers, and even farm equipment to the poor farmers. After one such campaign, I did a story from Bodeli block of Vadodara where the tomato crop from seeds supplied during last Krishi Rath had failed. Same morning, I received a call from the chief minister’s office informing me that an inquiry had been ordered, asking me to connect with the office of Director Agriculture for more information. This was the speed of responsiveness of the Modi administration. 

(Narendra Modi, then Gujarat CM, at the state's annual Krishi Mahotsav)

In the December 2007 election campaign for Gujarat Assembly, I was covering the tribal district of Ahwa-Dangs in south Gujarat. Modi addressed a rally there and gave substantial part of his speech in the local Dangi dialect which is a mix of Marathi, Gujarati, and the tribal languages. It was impressive, and I found it doubly so because a few days later Sonia Gandhi addressed the region from a 100-kms away in Chikhli in her heavily accented Hindi. Incidentally, this was the speech in which she made the Maut-ke-Saudagar comment turning the tide decisively in favour of Modi. And not quite incidentally, BJP won the Ahwa-Dangs seat for the first time in that election! 

Around that time, an old college friend in the United States sent me a DVD of a documentary – An Inconvenient Truth - by former US Vice President Al Gore. Marshalling science, Gore had shown the scale of catastrophe humanity was facing due to global warming. I got it sent to the chief minister through his PRO late Jagdish bhai Thakkar. I was told the CM was impressed, and a few days later we received a press note saying he had watched the film with his ministers and top bureaucrats over dinner at his official residence. Few months later Gujarat government became the first in Asia to setup a climate change department! Shows how quick Modi the administrator is at picking up important trends and focus on areas of concern. His subsequent involvement with the subject has made him a global leader on climate change, setting up 55-nations strong International Solar Alliance (ISA) in India, convince the world community about climate justice, and even write a book in response to Gore called Convenient Action. 

(Then CM Modi at the inauguration of a power sub-station in Gujarat's Kadi)

Sometime in 2008 I was sitting through a question hour of Gujarat Assembly when a young Congress MLA was finding it difficult to make his point in the din on the prevalence of sickle cell anaemia in tribal population of the state. Modi asked the Speaker Ashok Bhatt to get the house in order and reprimanded his own party colleagues so that everyone could listen to the young legislator from the tribal community. He could go beyond narrow party divide for the larger interest of the society.  

For someone who has carried the image of a strong Hindutva leader, Modi’s commitment to Gandhi, and as an offshoot, to toilets for cleanliness makes him an outlier. On his first campaign rally down south in Hyderabad after becoming BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate in 2013, Modi ended the speech with a ‘Yes We Can’ chant that was followed by the roaring crowd. I was there to cover the rally and found it amusing that an Obama slogan was used, which I mentioned in my lives. Later in the evening, I received a call from the Chief Minister’s Office, informing me of a speech from Junagadh in 2007 in which the CM had asked the crowd to chant ‘Yes We Can, Yes We Can.’ The subject of the chants was a campaign to get toilets in public spaces in Gujarat. I was even sent a clip. ‘Yes We Can’ cannot be an Obama copyright. 

All through these years, be it arranging additional funds to get water pipeline to the farthest border point in Kutch for the patrolling BSF troops, or, traveling to the remotest outposts in the Northeast to be with soldiers on Diwali, to organizing a big event to honour the constitution on 60th anniversary of its adoption, Modi had a sense of destiny about his national role which eventually materialized. Since 2014 we have seen it panning out in front of our eyes. 

(IMAGES: pmindia.gov.in/narendramodi.in)