This Article is From Sep 26, 2014

Modi Defies Expectations With Mix of Soft and Severe in India

Modi Defies Expectations With Mix of Soft and Severe in India

File Photo: Prime Minister Narendra Modi

New Delhi: Almost as soon as Narendra Modi became prime minister of India, whispers began circulating of mysterious phone calls from his office, upbraiding startled officials for infractions like inappropriate clothing or chummy-looking public meetings with tycoons.

The message was received. Modi, who is famously austere in his own habits, intends to impose discipline.

The United States will get a taste of Modi's style this week. Booked for back-to-back high-pressure appearances during his five days in New York and Washington, Modi, 64, has also announced that he will maintain a strict religious fast for the duration of the visit, which coincides with the Hindu festival of Navratri, consuming only tea and lemonade with honey.

The visit is a big moment for Modi, who offers himself as a metaphor for the India he wants to build - ambitious, confident and impatient with slackness of any kind.

Rarely has any world leader come full circle the way Modi has: Denied a U.S. visa for nearly a decade as punishment for his handling of religious riots that broke out in the state he then led, Modi flies into New York as an immensely popular leader and a sought-after strategic partner, uniquely capable of balancing the might of a rising China.

In the four months since he has taken office, Modi has disappointed those who were hoping for an Indian Margaret Thatcher, proving to be cautious and incremental in his use of economic policy. Instead, he has set about changing the architecture of the state, diluting the powers of ministries and concentrating them in his office. Modi is building a machine for governing, one that he intends to operate for a long time.

It is not yet clear whether he can pull it off. To succeed, Modi must bring about fundamental changes in India's economy and steer a stable course in a country prone to incendiary conflicts. Observers here, surveying still-unfilled positions in his government, wonder whether Modi will be able to trust outsiders enough to bring in policy talent. And critics say his concentrated power will make it more difficult for his own officials to question him.

M.J. Akbar, a spokesman for Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, dismissed those worries, saying Modi's early moves aimed at "setting the rules for his own government" and putting an end to a bureaucratic culture so loose that officials "used to tweet and send SMS's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting."

The prime minister, Akbar said, "is just a tough guy. Delhi hasn't seen a tough guy in a long time."

On the day Modi was endorsed as prime minister, he stood before Parliament and seemed close to tears, promising to focus his attention on "rural areas, farmers, untouchables, the weak and the pained," because "our weakest, our poorest have sent us here."

This was a new tone for Modi. His reputation had preceded him to New Delhi: His rise through his own party proved him a ruthless political operator, capable of sidelining well-established older leaders with ease. A stern, angry presence during the campaign, he had been championed by right-wing economists as someone prepared to slash away at the country's gargantuan subsidy programs.

Since taking office, though, Modi has presented a softer face to the country, guided by a populist's unerring instinct for his audience. In his major addresses, delivered without notes and in earthy, colloquial Hindi, he has spoken as a kindly moral instructor, focusing on such humble causes as the need to build toilets. Last week, perhaps responding to calls to move more quickly on reforms, Modi said he naturally gravitated to practical matters.

"There have been discussions about vision, about big vision and grand vision," he said, in comments published by The Indian Express. "I only want to say that I am a small person, and I think about small people. By thinking small for small people I am trying to make them grow. Nobody was thinking about these small people."

His bristles have mainly shown in the arena of foreign affairs. Last week, Modi was faced with a snap decision during a rare visit by the Chinese president, an event he hosted on his birthday, choreographed to cast the two leaders as potential partners. Chinese officials had dangled an investment package of as much as $100 billion, but as the two men sat down to dinner, Chinese and Indian troops were facing off against each other in the highlands of Ladakh, Kashmir, near the disputed border between the two nations.

With little time to decide, Modi took the unusual step of publicly prodding his Chinese guest over the border issue at a news conference, a moment that cast a shadow over the message of deepening trade.

Speaking of India in a recent interview with CNN, Modi made it clear that his goal was a historic restoration. "This is a country that once upon a time was called the golden bird," he said. . "We have fallen from where we were before. But now we have the chance to rise again."

Modi's toughness is certainly visible in New Delhi, a city where power has long been distributed among a constellation of heavyweight ministers, editors and business tycoons.

That balance has begun to change. Nearly every week during his early months in office, a new rumor began to circulate, each with the subtext that Modi and his team were keeping a close watch on officials. One described a minister who received a call from the prime minister's office on a Friday, was told the exact number of unapproved files sitting on his desk, and was so unnerved that he worked all weekend to clear the files, one after another.

Party officials would not confirm or deny these reports but acknowledged that officials were under scrutiny. "That officials are being monitored? Yes. Is their behavior being monitored? Yes," said Akhilesh Mishra, a Bharatiya Janata Party activist who worked as a strategist for the parliamentary campaign. The reports, he said, come from "a vast network of people, people who give a feedback mechanism."

Week by week, Modi has built up the prime minister's office into a dominant force in government. First, Cabinet officials were discouraged from speaking to the news media without permission. Ministers were barred from hiring personal staff members without approval.

And unlike his predecessors, Modi is said to be making many appointments himself. Senior officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, complained to The Hindustan Times that the government had begun to circulate the agenda for Cabinet meetings just hours before it was to begin, making it nearly impossible for them to fully participate in policymaking.

"Even in Indira Gandhi's time, you had advisers who were very powerful, they were larger than life and capable of giving input," said Siddharth Varadarajan, a journalist and senior fellow at Shiv Nadar University. "Here you have a prime minister whose strength is reminiscent of Indira Gandhi's, but I think it goes beyond that, because you'd at least have that layer of advisers."

Journalists now have virtually no opportunity to ask questions of top officials. As the Editors Guild of India complained in a letter published Tuesday, much of the bureaucracy has gone silent, and journalists have found themselves scrambling to get even basic information from the prime minister's office, which has yet to appoint a contact person for the news media.

India's business titans are another group facing an unfamiliar new landscape. Long accustomed to maintaining personal, informal contacts with officials in the ministries that grant crucial approvals, they must now fall in line with a new protocol: Meetings are to be formal, held in government offices, and presumed to be under the scrutiny of the prime minister's apparatus.

This is, on one hand, a way of ensuring that payoffs are not offered or received. It also gives corporate leaders the sense that they are being kept at arm's length, at least for the moment, said one executive from a large Indian company, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"Is Modi taking the demonstrative step of being wary of industry?" the executive said. "If that's just messaging, it's also risky, because you are almost sending the message that industry is the cause of corruption. If he actually believes it, that's terrible. Even if it's just signaling, that's bad enough."

Modi's supporters say his centralization of authority has begun to yield results: Ministries that previously worked as independent fiefs have fallen in line, and long-delayed projects have begun to move. India's economy is showing signs of a revival, growing at an annualized rate of 5.7 percent in the first quarter of the year, after languishing under 5 percent for nearly two years.

But Modi's time to make decisions is limited, and a backlog is said to be piling up. A surprising number of senior positions remain unfilled - notably, that of defense minister, despite this government's keen focus on defense. Arun Jaitley, a veteran lawmaker close to Modi, is temporarily serving as both finance minister and defense minister.

In some cases, the difficulty may be in identifying outside experts who are fully trusted by Modi's team. But that, said an analyst who consulted with the Bharatiya Janata Party's parliamentary campaign, is hardly surprising - Modi has never depended much on any one aide or adviser.

"He is his own master completely," the analyst said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "He has no problem seeking advice or talking to people. In terms of trust, I don't think 100 percent he trusts anybody."

© 2014, The New York Times News Service
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