Narendra Modi and the Power of Television in Gujarat

Gujarat after Television: Godhra and Elections

Politics has changed “after television,” not only because of the standardization of Hindu epics, which were broadcast in the 1980s, as Arvind Rajagopal (2001) has shown, but also, twenty years later, because of the surge of instant reporting à la CNN. Modi instrumentalized these new media five months after becoming chief minister of Gujarat in October 2001. On February 27, 2002, a train of returning Hindu activists who had gone to Ayodhya to build the contested “Ram temple” was attacked—probably by Muslims—in Godhra station. Fifty-nine people died after two coaches were set on fire early in the morning.

Chief minister Modi reached Godhra at about two in the afternoon, along with members of his government. He spoke on TV that evening. The testimony of anthropologist Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi (2012, 59), who was then conducting fieldwork in Ahmedabad, is particularly telling:

In the evening [on February 27], chief minister Modi proclaimed on television, not without a certain pathos in his voice, that the Godhra incident was a “pre-planned attack,” explicitly contradicting the [local civil servant] Collector’s statement released just a few hours earlier, also on television, which had described the incident not as planned but as an “accident.” Senior members of the central government in New Delhi echoed Modi’s words, speculating that the “foreign hand” of the infamous Pakistani intelligence services (Inter Services Intelligence or ISI) was involved.

That very evening, on the government’s orders, most of the bodies of those who had died in Godhra were taken to Ahmedabad for a postmortem and public ceremony. The arrival of the corpses was broadcast on television, generating considerable emotion, all the more so since they were shown merely covered with a sheet. These images contributed to the unleashing of violence against Muslims that engulfed Ahmedabad the day after resulting in an actual pogrom. Modi dissolved the assembly and insisted on organizing elections quickly in spite of a reluctant election commissioner who argued that the situation made voting complicated (at least for the tens of thousands of Muslim refugees who had left or lost their homes). But Modi succeeded in having the elections held in December of the same year.

During the election campaign, one of BJP’s television commercials began with the sound of a train pulling into a station, followed by the clamor of riots and women’s screams before the ringing of temple bells was blocked out by the sound of automatic rifle fire. A few frames later, Modi’s reassuring countenance appeared, hinting to voters that only he could protect Gujarat from such violence. Modi won a majority that the BJP had never achieved before largely because of the polarization of the voters along communal lines, with Hindus representing about 90 percent of the population of Gujarat.

Modi was to instrumentalize television in a subtler manner during the 2007 election campaign. He first used it to be associated with Gujarati asmita (“identity”), as evident from the name of the TV channel, “Vande Gujarat” (adapted from Vande Mataram or “Hail Motherland,” a familiar nationalist slogan), which he launched during the 2007 election campaign.

The professional manner in which this channel—like the rest of his campaign—was managed had probably much to do with the fact that Modi had turned to the expertise of a Washington-based PR and lobbying firm, APCO Worldwide. In August 2007, this company, “the second largest independent PR firm in America,” charged over US$25,000 a month to manage Modi’s account, a price only slightly more than the costs they charged for also running the biennial industrial summit, “Vibrant Gujarat” (Vishnu 2011). When the contract was signed, APCO had already worked for the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha; the president for life of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev; and the former Russian oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky (Times of India 2007). According to a Right to Information query, the contract seems to have been renegotiated in 2010 to develop a domestic version of the Friends of Gujarat, an organization based among the Indian diaspora in the United States and the United Kingdom. For Rs. 22.5 million (approximately US$400,000) per year,

APCO will also gauge the tonality of coverage and identify journalists who can further be Media Ambassadors for Gujarat. The idea is to expand and build on the “Friends of Gujarat” circle so as to have a sustained programme of endorsement and outreach. (Suresh 2013)

In addition to the hiring of an American PR company, Modi also explored new modes of communication using the latest technology in 2007. Having laptops in his home and office, as well as for travel, he was supposed to spend several hours reading the 200–250 e-mails he received daily from citizens of Gujarat. He reportedly responded to 10 percent of them and let the bureaucracy take care of the others (Jaffrelot 2008). Modi’s 2007 campaign made use of the Internet and the fourteen out of fifty-two million Gujaratis who had a cell phone at the time. Such phones enabled Modi to send thousands of SMS and MMS to potential voters as well as party cadres.

However, Modi remained more interested in the power of images, something television could promote effectively.

Image Building beyond Television: Visual Populism

For the 2012 election campaign, Modi launched a new TV channel, NaMo, but went one step further by holding a series of virtual public meetings as well. This meant that Modi’s hologram appeared on stage in 3D simultaneously in different locations across Gujarat (twenty-six sites on the 2nd of December, for instance). He delivered his speeches to massive audiences, who were sometimes mesmerized; some of his supporters even wondered: “is this real?” Modi continued with more conventional outreach, too. He addressed 125 rallies in the first fifteen days of December 2102, or ten meetings a day (Dave 2012, 1). Yet his use of 3D technology reveals his attention to the exceptional power of images in politics (and in Indian civilization or culture). He held 132 holographic shows during the 2012 election campaign to communicate directly with a huge number of citizens, at the cost of Rs. 150 crore (about US$2 million), according to some estimates (Nair 2012, 1).

Conclusion

If Congress leader and former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi’s brand of 1970s populism relied mostly on the radio, Modi, who has short circuited his party in the same proportion, belongs to the era of television. But he has not only used this medium to promote his image; television has also played a role in preparing the ground for the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. Moreover, he has not relied on television alone to promote his image, as evident from the use of holograms.

The growing importance of images in the age of television has created the conditions for Modi to evolve his nondiscursive mode of political communication. In this type of high-tech populism, the dress codes and the body language have concurred, enabling him to relate directly to his fellow sixty million Gujaratis (in spite of the fact that never more than 50 percent of them voted for him). The ubiquity of the image that television has brought into politics largely explains his obsession with details, including the colors to wear and the length of his shirtsleeves.

Although Gujarat was the launch pad for Modi, he has further systematized his use of the media during the 2014 election campaign. No Indian politician had so effectively promoted their image by resorting to the media since Indira Gandhi at the national level. But regionally, chief ministers had already shown the way. Among them, cinema stars (film netas), like filmstar-turned-politicians MGR in Tamil Nadu and Rama Rao in Andhra Pradesh, played a pioneering role in the 1970s and 1980s. Lately, female chief ministers have followed suit, as evident from the career of Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu, Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, and Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal. Yet, unlike the case of Modi that we have considered here, these women have never been able to gain recognition beyond their state in any significant way.

The manner in which one man has come to dominate the visual space in India has to do with the absence of proper regulations for partisan coverage on primetime television and campaign spending limits. To wit, 2014 election campaign expenditures are estimated to be US$5 billion (Vaishnav 2014), a figure that approximates the record-breaking 2012 American election. One-fifth of this amount was disbursed by the BJP (Economist 2014, 20). Media ownership patterns have also contributed their share to Modi’s ubiquity. The concentration of television channels in the hands of few companies may eventually affect media pluralism in India, as documented by Rajagopal (forthcoming). One bellwether was the recent parliamentary elections. The Reliance corporation, whose CEO Mukesh Ambani is an old supporter of Modi, gained control of the television company Network 18. As a result, key journalists and the managing director of the network’s main channel, CNN-IBN, resigned. If Modi continues this trend, of exerting indirect control on the electronic media that have a broad national appeal and circulation (at least among the Hindu majority audience that is his “natural” constituency), then he may replicate in India the kind of populist democracy that Berlusconi established in Italy or even, in a more authoritarian vein, Erdogan in Turkey (see also Ohm, 2015).