Preparing for 2024

Journalist Minhaz Merchant's book is a panoramic and sympathetic view of Narendra Modi's rise with some added nuggets of advice

Modi: The Challenge of 2024

Author: Minhaz Merchant

Publisher: Amaryllis Publications

Pages: 429 

Price: Rs 899

Newspaper editorials are devices through which newspaper editors — and owners, sometimes — tell the government what they think of it, frequently pointing out how they’ve got it all wrong. Sometimes they are obsequious, provoking L K Advani to observe that when asked to bend, they were ready to crawl. Sometimes they’re stinging, like the blank space some newspapers ran in the columns meant for editorials on June 28, 1975, in protest against the Emergency and press censorship.

Consider Minhaz Merchant’s book as a 429-page editorial in which he describes Narendra Modi’s rise to power, and his government’s policies, what he’s doing right and where he’s going wrong. He proffers advice, peppering it with anecdotes, some of which have come to him via secondary sources and are not cross-checked. The book is about Mr Modi. But it is also about Messrs Merchant and Modi.

The author has impeccable credentials to write a Modi book. He says he was the first one Mr Modi asked when he wanted a biography written after the 2002 Godhra riots as “there was a lot of misinformation” about him. Mr Merchant declined politely — he had already written a biography of Rajiv Gandhi and “one prime ministerial book is enough”. He’s the one who referred Mr Modi to Andy Marino whose Narendra Modi: A Political Biography Mr Merchant considers a “dispassionate” account.

Mr Merchant records his own place in history: The 2013 letter he wrote to Mr Advani, advising him to stand down because he was past it, the Goa national executive meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that all but crowned Mr Modi as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate; and his contribution to the campaign — he advised Mr Modi to publish a White Paper on the economy and foreign policy, advice that the latter did not take.

Regular one-on-one meetings with India’s prime minister should have followed but Mr Merchant says: “It’s important in journalism to not only be politically neutral but to be seen to be politically neutral.” As Mr Merchant is also a businessman who runs a successful printing and publishing house, this is probably sensible. But he’s not averse to a little vanity. He says, “Of the 2,500 people the Prime Minister follows on Twitter, I am one of the very few who has never followed him back.”

So, while Mr Merchant is in broad approval of Mr Modi’s policies, he suggests some could have been tweaked. Demonetisation, a signature Modi venture, and Goods and Services Tax, he says, flattened the small and medium enterprises sector, as small businesses shut shop. Others feel demonetisation was the worst thing to happen to India’s economy. Mr Merchant breezes through the crisis, commenting that the economy picked up, after all, but doesn’t pause to count the costs or the bodies. He notes that the retreat on amending farm laws “strengthened the nagging perception that the Modi government will put bad politics ahead of good economics”.

Similarly, he writes at length about India’s new secularism, but also points out that Hinduism needs to be reformed. He notes that the tendency to deify Mr Modi is growing and likens it to the “India is Indira and Indira is India” phase that led to the Congress being turfed out of power for a while. “The similarity with Modi is uncanny,” he says. His advice to the PM? “As his second five-year term draws to a close, Modi needs ministers who aren’t afraid to disagree with him”.

The author is dismissive of the INDIA alliance and Rahul, Priyanka and Sonia Gandhi’s ambitions and is deeply critical of Nehru’s role in the evolution of India’s democracy. He also pans the Western press’s inability to understand the politics and sophistication of Indian politics.

History, along with motherhood and apple pie, are offered as ways in which Mr Modi can put his imprimatur on foreign policy. Mr Merchant approves of Modi’s current choice of Minister for External Affairs, noting that S Jaishankar’s father K Subrahmanyam often wrote for his publications. He has news: China is a global Bad Boy, relying on threat, coercion and suppression of democratic rights to manage its economy. What should India do? Deploy four important levers it possesses in keeping China off balance: Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang and demography. He implores MrModi to jettison decades of India’s appease-China diplomacy. He implies it is the world’s worst kept secret that Beijing would prefer a China-friendly Congress government to come to power in India. It is hard to ascertain where this perception is coming from.

Mr Merchant, however, is at a loss to explain how or why Russia, India’s traditional friend, has swapped buddies and is now in a Chinese embrace. What should Mr Modi do? He advises policy-makers to learn to think like chess grandmasters in an endgame with three key pieces as 2047 draws near: China, India and coloured-majority America. The butt of ridicule in the book, fashionably, is Britain.

Mr Merchant has important nuggets to offer about the poles of power in the BJP. He is the first serious writer to moot the issue of Mr Modi’s successor and notes the rise of UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath alongside Home Minister Amit Shah. He also launches an inexplicable broadside against former Vice-President Hamid Ansari, citing a book written by a R&AW operative about Mr Ansari’s role as ambassador in Iran. It would have been in the interests of good journalism to get Mr Ansari’s version of the events.

Over 10 broad sections and 31 chapters, the book is a panoramic and sympathetic view of Mr Modi’s rise. For those interested in political history, this volume should not be missed.