It’s a government of smoke and mirrors: Shashi Tharoor

At a time when it seems the only resource reliably worth the plunder is the public’s attention span, the advertising industry has to toil harder to separate a fool from his money. Take, for instance, books — a considerably attention-intensive product in an increasingly attention-deficit society. When new marketing strategies for books veer from bizarre book trailers to courting controversy on social media, politician and former diplomat Shashi Tharoor chose to promote his latest title, The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and his India , through a device made familiar by his Twitter forays: a long, mildly baffling word.

‘Floccinaucinihilipilification’ was intended to convey what Tharoor thought of the Central government. Contrary to what breathless headlines insisted, the word was not being introduced to Indian audiences for the first time. In his 1991 film Agantuk , filmmaker Satyajit Ray has the protagonist, played by Utpal Dutt, explain the word’s meaning: “It means having little or no value”. Remarking how 29 letters are needed to express this sentiment, Dutt’s character asks: “Is this what civilisation has come to?”

Interestingly, Tharoor’s new book sets out to ask the same question.

A man and his regime

BL ink met Tharoor (62) at his residence in Lodhi Estate in New Delhi. The former UN under-secretary general bears all the signs of the only leveller in a power- and hierarchy-obsessed city — a smog-induced cold. But that hardly dulls the edges of his words as he explains the focus of the book — a fine-grained scrutiny of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s four-and-a-half years at the helm of India.

“I look at this phase in India’s political history through the prism of the Prime Minister specifically because his personal stamp is evident throughout his regime,” Tharoor says.

The book begins with a profile, an account of the “fundamental contradiction” within Modi as PM. Tharoor writes, “[Modi] advocates liberal principles and objectives, but if these are to be fulfilled, he would need to jettison the very illiberal forces that have helped ensure his electoral victories.” Referring to how the current dispensation has moved from the classic trope of Hindutva into that of “Moditva” — described in the opening chapter as “a combination of Hindutva, nationalism, economic development and overweening personal leadership” — Tharoor tells BL ink , “It became impossible to ignore the PM’s personal responsibility for the direction of the government.”

The contents page — generally a benign section in most books — reads like an incriminating laundry list. With chapter titles such as ‘A Growing Wave of Communalism’, ‘The Attack on Institutions’, ‘Destroying Parliament’, and ‘The Dark Truth About Black Money’, the book is a wide-canvas sketch of the government’s many controversial measures and policies.

A divisive logic

Tharoor, who is a Congress Member of Parliament from the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency in Kerala, does not find it easy to make time to write. “I have a full day’s work in my constituency and I therefore write at night,” he explains. “So I didn’t sleep much for the last nine months, trying to get the book together. But it was worth it, because the impact of the book is greater now, with only a few months left to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, than had it arrived in the midst of the hullaballoo of an ongoing election.” He says emphatically, “I want people to think about these things.”

Tharoor has frequently been in the eye of a storm for making remarks that raise the hackles of either his own party members or his detractors. He was dropped as a spokesperson by the Congress when he congratulated Modi for his victory in the 2014 polls; earlier this week, he was attacked by the BJP for describing Modi as a scorpion sitting on a Shivalingam. One cannot hit it with one’s hands, nor with a slipper, he said, and later clarified that he was merely repeating what an unnamed RSS member had been quoted as saying in a published article.

Alibis-in-arms: Tharoor at the Delhi book launch with Congress leader P Chidambaram, former PM Manmohan Singh and former Union minister Arun Shourie

The Paradoxical Prime Minister comes on the heels of Tharoor’s Why I am a Hindu , released in January this year. Reaffirming the pluralist ethos of the Hindu faith, the book defends the more inclusive and compassionate tenets of Hinduism against the excesses of Hindutva — cow vigilantism, lynch mobs, ghar wapsi , love jihad.

“It’s startling to know that of all the cow vigilante incidents, 97 per cent took place in Modi’s regime. We’re looking at an extraordinary transformation here,” he says. “I grew up in the India of the 1960s, the India of inclusion, national integration, along with a certain amount of complacency about the fact that we had rejected the logic of Partition, and that we were a country for everyone. All of those things are now being fundamentally questioned.”

Pointing out “an intangible but perceptible change in the attitudes of people”, the former minister uses the PM’s meteoric political ascent as a metaphor that explains the creeping resurgence of Hindu chauvinism in modern India.

Wielding a sales pitch as a weapon

Tharoor locates Modi’s intellectual and political conditioning within the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which from its origins in 1925 propagated a vision of a Hindu Rashtra founded on an aggressively masculine and exclusionary nationalism.

Charting Modi’s political maturation from pracharak to chief minister, amid the 2002 riots that later led the Opposition to coin the epithet Maut ka Saudagar (‘Merchant of Death’), to eventually becoming a prime ministerial candidate on the strength of his economic management of Gujarat, Tharoor cites a market analogy.

“All this was deftly portrayed through skilled marketing: the product was the chief minister himself, the sales pitch was slick and tirelessly repeated, and the ‘consumer’ was the Indian voter, first in Gujarat but thereafter across the nation,” he writes.

The way the Modi government has weaponised social media and image marketing is a recurrent theme in the book. Discussing Modi’s “politics of performance”, Tharoor says, “It goes back to 2012-13 when Modi starts building up his personal image, hires a number of internationally recognised public relations firms and starts putting out images and messages that are meant to change the perception of what people assume he is and what he might be.”

He continues, “Suddenly, a very successful and rather expensive and extensive campaign is conducted to portray him as not another khaki shorts-wearing RSS pracharak , and to actually sell the idea to young Indians that here was a man who could identify with their aspirations.” Tharoor summarises this in the book: “Here was a new standard-bearer, a smartly attired modern man who could click a mouse with one hand while brandishing a trishul in the other.”

However, the MP believes Modi has had less success in selling his government policies to the public, despite the staggering budget for publicity alone.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, in response to a Right to Information query, said in May that the Modi government had spent ₹4,343 crore on publicity since it came to power in May 2014. Tharoor points out how the publicity budget for the Swachh Bharat Mission was five times the outlay for the mission itself. “This is very much a government of smoke and mirrors, that substantive results are far less important to them than the appearance of results; and this is apparent across the board,” he argues. “The photo-op trumps the outcome.”

My party, right or wrong

“One wonders what will remain of the pillars of our democracy by the time Modi is done if he gets another second innings, and therefore it is extremely important to deny him that,” Tharoor says as he concludes the interview.

The book heaves with the weight of its intended purpose — to change the fate of an election. But the “thoughtful, book-reading, Indian public”, for whom Tharoor says he has written his latest title, is certain to notice a glaring blindness in the essays.

If someone unfamiliar with Indian political and social history were to read them, they would come away thinking worse of the Indian voting public for electing such a government. Unless, of course, one also widens the scope of enquiry to include the role that Tharoor’s own party has had in making Modi seem like the inevitable, inexorable choice.

The Paradoxical Prime Minister styles itself as the literary equivalent of a speeding, wailing ambulance taking the voter’s moral and intellectual conscience through the path to recovery — a Modi- mukt sarkar.

But it fails to acknowledge the many ways in which the voter was so severely ailing that Modi seemed like a cure.

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