by Barkha Dutt
Every now and then the BJP leadership would let journalists know that the prime minister was furious and the motormouth MPs had been put on notice. But a few weeks would pass and they would be back at it again. Given his early moves as prime minister to move away from overtly sectarian politics, one would have thought that ministers like Sharma or MPs like Adityanath would be publicly rebuked, if not sacked from office. Instead, there was never any direct comment from the prime minister and only generalized statements of disapproval from party spokespersons.
Why, for instance, did the BJP give such a long rope to the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra—undoubtedly a weaker partner in the coalition? The Sena had embarrassed not just the government, it had shamed India with its acts of violent hooliganism against visiting Pakistanis—authors, artistes, even cricketing officials—disrupting meetings and unleashing ugly ink attacks. While ministers like Arun Jaitley were swift in their condemnation, the prime minister himself did not reveal his ‘mann ki baat’, on this or on a variety of other incidents that in fact should have worried him greatly.
I have always felt, in the many years that I have observed him, that Modi’s ambitions are personal not ideological. His political career may have had Hindutva roots, but it was clear to me that if he needed to abandon these in the pursuit of a political legacy, he wouldn’t think twice. Given Modi’s amplified sense of self and his well-earned satisfaction at having reached where he has, it would not be an exaggeration to say that what guided him was probably the desire to go down in history as one of the greatest and longest serving prime ministers the country had ever had. But this could hardly be possible if his government remained mired in sectarian and divisive controversies. Why was Modi not reining in right-wing extremists in a visible way? Was he reining them in at all? It was hard to explain how a government that was voted in at least partially on the strength of its effective messaging and communication had lost control over the development narrative so soon. Was it incompetence, ideological confusion or simply a mild contempt for a liberal media that the BJP had in any case always seen as biased?
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These questions become even more relevant when you think of Modi’s pragmatism, and ability to constantly confuse those who think they have figured him out. I remember a high-voltage controversy that Modi seized hold of to his advantage. This took place in 2013. A day before the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Nawaz Sharif were scheduled to meet during the annual United Nations summit in the US, I landed a breakfast meeting with Nawaz Sharif at the spiffy New York Palace Hotel.
Sharif’s authority had not yet been diminished by Pakistan’s overweening military. When I had met him just four months ago in the sylvan sprawl of his mansion in Raiwind, an hour from Lahore, he was a man in command of his nation. As peacocks preened on the vast expanse of green that encircled the roof to floor glass windows of the gold and rust drawing room and phalsa juice was brought out in long-stemmed glasses—still basking in his impressive electoral majority, Sharif had told me that, as prime minister, it was he who was the ‘boss’ and not the army chief. For a man who had been pushed into exile a decade earlier by the then army chief, Pervez Musharraf, these were rather brave and risky words. But then Sharif had matured as a politician, working quietly with Benazir Bhutto when she was alive to restore a semblance of democracy to his country. When she was assassinated, he gave me a seat on his private plane to her funeral in Sindh and I could see how genuinely devastated he was.
During Asif Ali Zardari’s turbulent years in power he had had several opportunities to bring him down but he opted to remain a responsible Opposition leader. Now, back as prime minister of Pakistan for the third time, he was confident of ruling effectively. In his interview with me, hours before he was sworn in as PM, he spoke of his desire to visit India ‘whether invited or not’ and repair the broken threads of the 1999 war. The Manmohan Singh government wrote to him with an open-ended invite just hours later. While Sharif never did visit India while Manmohan Singh was prime minister, the two men had agreed to meet in America on the sidelines of the annual United Nations summit.
Over many years of reporting from Pakistan I had got to know Sharif reasonably well and he spoke to me with a degree of candour and informality. He wanted an understanding of how his domestic politics back home were being appraised in India. He told me he had the go-ahead, from both the government and the army, to offer India the much talked about ‘most favoured nation’ status to boost trade ties. But he was unsure of making the announcement while an outgoing prime minister—whose authority seemed to be waning—was at the helm in Delhi. He told me it would mean investing a lot of political capital for minimal return. By the end of our informal chat he said he had decided to save the breakthrough for the new government in India.
Naturally, I was keen to get him on record and asked him if he would consider a short television interview. Sharif said he would think about it, but only after I joined him downstairs in the hotel coffee shop for breakfast. Sharif was always extremely hospitable and, like all Punjabis, excellent food for him was the centrepiece of any good conversation. Once he got to know you he was also garrulous—a raconteur who lapsed into earthy Punjabi or Urdu while spouting dialogues from his favourite film, Mughal-e-Azam, or recounting allegories, fables and jokes, which he did often to make a larger political point.
At the table, I found myself joining a large Pakistani delegation which included the country’s national security adviser at the time, Sartaj Aziz, and the foreign secretary Jaleel Jilani, whom I knew from his days at the high commission in Delhi. I was seated at the corner of the table right between the prime minister and the redoubtable Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir. By now, restless and more interested in a possible scoop than the eggs and freshly cut fruit spread out before me, I once again asked Sharif if he would consider stepping out into the hotel lobby where my cameraman and producer were waiting for me. Mir overheard and immediately interrupted to complain that no Pakistani journalist had been granted an interview by Manmohan Singh and argued that it would be most unfair if an Indian were to land an interview with Sharif.
The conversation at the table shifted to the rather sensitive subject of the Punjab government in Pakistan, headed by Sharif’s brother Shehbaz, funding the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (the patron group of the Lashkar-e-Taiba). During his meeting at the White House, Manmohan Singh had already brought up the ‘handsome financial support’ by Pakistan’s provincial government to schools, hospitals and mosques linked to the Jamaat headed by the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks, Hafiz Saeed. In his talks with the US president, Singh had described Pakistan as ‘the epicentre of terror’ and ‘the major wild card in the region’. Obama had called the LeT a worldwide threat. Washington’s public reprimand came on the heels of twin terror strikes in Jammu in which ten people had died.
Officials at Sharif’s table launched into a complicated and unconvincing rebuttal of India’s charge arguing that the state machinery had taken over the management of the madrassas and dispensaries and that they were no longer controlled by Hafiz Saeed. At this point Sharif, turned to me and asked, rhetorically of course, why India felt the need to take its complaint to the United States when the leaders of both countries were scheduled to meet each other anyway.
I explained, as best as I could, that there was enormous political and public pressure on the government to halt the recent dialogue with Pakistan because of unabated terrorism. Any leader, in particular Manmohan Singh—who was often accused of being soft on Pakistan because of his own pre-Partition links of birth and ancestry—would have to publicly underline that it was not business as usual. And besides, with America feeding Pakistan millions of dollars in military aid—more than $700 million that year alone—wasn’t Big Brother already a part of the equation?
Sharif persisted. Couldn’t Manmohan Singh have brought India’s grievances and concerns directly to him? At this point he suddenly lapsed into a mix of Punjabi and Urdu and said the week’s developments re
minded him of a story. He related the tale of a dispute in a village between a woman and a neighbour. I can’t say I understood every single word but the gist of the story went something like this: the warring parties approached the village Qazi with prayers to intervene in their dispute. Listening to them the cleric’s advice was that you should seek blessings for yourself but not complain about others or seek ‘baddua’ (malediction) for them. From what I understood, it was a strictly figurative, non-literal tale with the message that disagreements were best resolved without third parties intervening. It appeared that he had basically repeated himself in a more metaphorical way to argue about the need for Pakistan and India to negotiate directly rather than use the US as an intermediary. As a journalist who had seen bigger problems break down talks between India and Pakistan, I didn’t pay too much attention.
Already distracted by a looming deadline I once again pressed Sharif for an interview. This time he relented and I left the table hastily to organize the logistics. Later, among the other remarks he made on camera, Sharif called Manmohan Singh a ‘good man’ whom he would like to welcome to Pakistan for a ‘long overdue visit’. Chuffed with my scoop, I dashed out of the hotel to uplink the footage to New Delhi for the prime-time bulletin.
A few minutes later my phone began beeping frantically. I saw that there was a flood of tweets, mostly by supporters of the BJP and other journalists, asking me whether Nawaz Sharif had pejoratively called Manmohan Singh a ‘dehati aurat’ (village woman).
The controversy was started by Hamid Mir who had filed a news report based on our informal breakfast conversation. He had not only claimed that Manmohan Singh had been compared to a village woman, but he said the comments were made in my presence.
I was both furious and taken aback. There had been no such phrase used for the prime minister while I was at breakfast except for the brief anecdote about the village dispute that had been a metaphor for something else altogether.
It was late night in India by now and social media had just picked up the story. Sensing trouble—because I’ve seen how even a misplaced comma can mean a full stop in Indo-Pak talks—I picked up the phone and called officials in both the foreign ministry and the prime minister’s office and recounted in detail what had transpired.
The officers I spoke to were sanguine; one wondered if it was Hamid Mir’s intention to sour the bilateral, another asked whether he was just irritated that I had scooped the interview with Sharif. They were going to inform Manmohan Singh about what had happened and would get back to me if they needed any clarifications.
The diplomats were of the opinion that Twitter hysteria among some users did not need to influence the government’s response. By now even Mir had tweeted that ‘nothing derogatory’ had been said by Sharif about the Indian PM. It would have ended there were it not for what happened next.
I fell asleep, exhausted after an unexpectedly harrowing day only to be woken up in the middle of the night by incessant calls from Ruby, my producer in Delhi. ‘Have you seen what Narendra Modi has said about you at his recent rally?’ she asked.
Elections were only eight months away and the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate was in fine fettle. In a deft political move that reinforced his nationalism and made the incumbent leader look weak and humiliated, he roared from the stage that India would not tolerate its PM being insulted. ‘How dare you address my nation’s prime minister as a village woman? We can fight with him on policies but this we will not tolerate. This nation of 120 crore people will not tolerate this insult.’
In his address was also a message for me. ‘The journalists who were sitting in front of Nawaz Sharif when he was insulting our prime minister should also answer to the people of my country. Journalists who were having sweets with Nawaz Sharif when he was abusing our prime minister, calling him a village woman, I would expect them to refuse the sweets and walk out.’ Modi had not named me but since I was the only Indian journalist present at the breakfast and I had already acknowledged that online, there was no ambiguity about who his message was directed at.
I jumped out of bed, made myself presentable, hailed a cab in the pitch dark and made my way to the hotel where the cameras were up and ready for me to go live. In two decades of being a practising journalist you get used to controversy stalking you, but this was new even for me. Never before had I been injected into the electoral battle between a prime minister and his main challenger.
On social media I was being abused and hounded in the vilest terms for supposedly not standing up for India. Journalists were calling me for quotes and clarifications. In the cab I dashed off a stern mail to Hamid Mir expressing my anger and disappointment at his distortion of events. On television I talked again and again about what had been said and what had not.
By now I knew that with the issue having erupted in the domestic political arena the prime minister’s team would not be able to treat it with the levity that had been their first response. Sure enough, ahead of the dialogue, the Pakistan foreign secretary was tasked by Sharif to explain things to the national security adviser. And when Nawaz Sharif and Manmohan Singh finally met, the Pakistan prime minister’s opening gambit was a defensive expression of hope that Singh was not ‘disturbed’ by what the Indian foreign minister Salman Khurshid later called ‘something silly like this, really a non-issue’.
With the benefit of emotional distance from the surreal aspect of my own unwitting role in that controversy, it was clear that Narendra Modi’s calculated intervention was illustrative of what a smart politician he was. Manmohan Singh was taunted, mocked and jeered at by the BJP almost every day for the government’s weak-willed Pakistan policy. With ten people dead in terror strikes, this was an opportunity for Modi to strengthen that argument ahead of the India–Pakistan meet. At that point, Manmohan Singh’s stock was at a particularly low ebb. His party vice president Rahul Gandhi had just ripped up an ordinance the PM had given his assent to, thereby humiliating him. By presenting Manmohan Singh as a man whose authority was respected neither at home nor abroad and yet taking his side against the Pakistani premier who had dared to ‘insult’ him, Modi managed to make Manmohan Singh look frail and ineffectual and himself seem firm, yet fair and patriotic when it came to matters of national pride.
The motivation for drawing me into the debate remains less clear. Was it because I was one of the journalists he didn’t like or was it illustrative of his often uneasy relationship with the media; or was it a chance to create a simplistic but instantly effective debate around who had passed the patriotism test? I am still not sure what the correct answer is. Of course that was Modi in the Opposition. As prime minister, his Pakistan policy soon reflected the essential contradiction he was trapped by. He wanted, like every prime minister before him, to be the man who would deliver lasting peace to South Asia, but at the same time, for his core constituency, he could not veer too far from the machismo of the man who boasted of a ‘56-inch chest’. In other words he was attempting to think out of the box but also felt compelled to appear tougher with Pakistan than his predecessors. The result was confusion. After Sharif and Modi’s first meeting in Delhi they agreed to resume the stalled dialogue between the foreign secretaries of both countries. Then, the Pakistan high commissioner met with Kashmiri separatists ahead of those talks, as they had been doing for years, including in Vajpayee’s time. The Modi government protested and scrapped the talks. His hardline supporters hailed the decision as evidence that Modi was not going to be ‘soft’ like Vajpayee. Around the same time guns erupted at the LoC, testing the sustainability of a decade-old ceasefire agreement. BJP spokespersons were quick to go on TV and talk about how under the Modi government the army had a free hand to respond with the might it considered appropriate. ‘Our forces will make the cost of [Pakistan’s] adventurism unaffordable,’ warned Arun Jaitley.
But unknown to the media and certainly the public at large—and in yet more proof that basically there was nothing doctrinaire about Modi’s ideologi
cal formulations—both he and Sharif had found someone to keep them connected even when things got difficult. When the two leaders first met one on one in Delhi they discussed whether they wanted to repeat the back-channel model the previous governments had followed of deploying veteran diplomats in the role of special envoys. The model had permitted the conducting of discreet dialogue, usually in a neutral territory like Dubai, free from the pressure of political and public opinion. But those in the know say both Modi and Sharif decided to keep the reins of the relationship in their own hands instead, leaving them to decide when to pull back and when to let go. However, they agreed that it could be useful to talk informally through a mutual acquaintance they both felt comfortable with.
The unexpected conduit was the steel magnate with movie-star looks—Sajjan Jindal—brother of former Congress legislator Naveen Jindal. When Sharif was in Delhi, Jindal hosted a tea party for the Pakistani premier right after his meeting with Modi. It attracted little attention in the Indian media but in Pakistan, Sharif drew flak for finding time for Jindal and not for Kashmiri separatists (Sharif was the first Pakistani leader to visit India and not meet with the Hurriyat Conference or mention Kashmir in his public statements).
It was no secret that Indian steelmakers, both state and private players, were looking to foster friendly relations with Pakistan; they needed this to happen so they could ferry iron ore from Afghanistan by road across Pakistan from where it would be shipped to ports in western and southern India. When Sharif was in Delhi for Modi’s swearing-in he invited me to Delhi’s Taj Mansingh Hotel to have a cup of tea with him. In the lobby, I bumped into Jindal escorting Sharif’s son Hussain for lunch. I was struck by how friendly they seemed but assumed it was something to do with Jindal’s business interests. However, Jindal’s relationship with Sharif appeared to have gone beyond that of a businessman seeking to build a relationship with a head of state to further his business interests; they appeared to have become confidants.
