CBI’s explosive first chargesheet in the Ishrat Jahan case spells perhaps the biggest challenge for the Modi government since the 2002 Gujarat riots.

With the latest revelation from the chargesheet of Modi’s alleged nod to the alleged fake encounter of 19-year student Ishrat Jahan and three others by the Gujarat Police, in collusion with the Intelligence Bureau, the scandal seems to have reached within sniffing distance of Modi and his trusted aide Amit Shah.

What does this mean for the Gujarat Chief Minister and his political ambitions? With less than a year for the next general elections, how does this scandal impact Modi’s acceptability as a national leader?

Firstpost spoke to Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, journalist and author of the recently published biography Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times about the impact of the Ishrat Jahan case on Modi’s political future and asked him whether Modi is ready for India.

Excerpts from the interview:

Modi seems to be making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

I think as far as he is concerned he is making headlines for all the right reasons.

Why is that?

The Ishrat Jahan case helps him consolidate support in his core constituency. It also helps him get those people who are positively inclined to him but have not rallied behind him, the fence-sitters, on his side. They will see it as yet another attempt by the government and the CBI to fix Modi especially since it is coming now, ten months ahead of general elections and one month after he was made chief of BJP’s election campaign committee.

This is going to polarise the voters further. And any form of polarisation will only help Modi. It will help Modi within the Sangh Parivar and it will help him within the entire political canvas.

During your interviews with Modi, did he talk about the Ishrat Jahan case?

I didn’t speak about any specific case with him. The moment we started talking about 2002 and thereafter he would immediately shut himself. There are two phases in the political life of Narendra Modi. Pre-2002 and post-2002, that is, pre-Godhra and post-Godhra. His first his reaction to talking about post Godhra is ‘whatever I have to say I have already said. I have said it to the SIT’.

I asked him very specifically what his exact thoughts were when he heard about the Godhra carnage. He did not even want to say what the thought in his mind was. All he only said ‘I have said what I have to say’. The reason is very simple. What he said to the SIT was a well-prepared text. He is aware that all these cases are sub-judice and will come up in the next few years. So he would not want to say anything that would be contradictory to what he told the SIT. So he was very careful with the words he used in the interview with me and did not want to give any fodder that could be used against him at a later date.

Modi, after the 2002 riots, has tried to re-cast himself as the face of economic development. Do you think the Ishrat Jahan case has undone that makeover?

I have never believed what some Modi supporters have argued that he has put 2002 behind. He has never put 2002 behind. Putting 2002 behind would mean to tell the Muslim community that what happened in 2002 was wrong. His development model, his so-called development model, is also a continuation of the 2002 model. It does not include a very vital element of inclusion and distribution. In his growth formula, distribution is incidental, it is not essential the way it was defined by Nehru that any growth has to be accompanied by distribution.

In Gujarat there are very good studies that show that not just Muslims but other deprived sections – Dalits and the tribals – have been left out of this entire developmental mirage that has been created by Modi.

He basically believes that there is no problem with religious minorities in this country following their religious beliefs, but as far as their existence in society is concerned we will not give them any special rights or recognition as members of a religious community, they have to be part of a large whole.

Will this case have any impact at all on Modi’s corporate or the urban middle-class support?

Those who consider him communal have considered him communal for the last ten years. But I don’t see the number of those who have very sharp disagreements with his political viewpoint growing despite Ishrat. But the number of people who are on Modi’s side is likely to grow.

Corporates are only bothered about industrial security. They are concerned that they should not be rampant trade unionism of the kind the Tatas faced in West Bengal. They would not want riotous situations. Gujarat in the last ten years has had no riots. Even Surat has been riot free. After 2002, it is going to very difficult for any kind riotous situation to be provoked in Gujarat.

So, contrary to perception, 2002 made Modi. And the Ishrat Jahan will remake him?

The Ishrat Jahan case will remake him. The more you try to pin him down, the more you are trying to make the same mistake you made in 2007 by calling him a maut ka saudagar. It gave a tremendous boost to his popularity and it also helped him consolidate the dissidents within his party.

The question that is often asked is whether India is ready for Modi. But is Modi ready for India?

Modi is not ready for my India. He is ready for his idea of India.

And what is his idea of India?

I’ll tell you the way I look at Modi. I consider Modi to be the first national mainstream political leader who has completely broken the Nehruvian template of what a political leader should be. There were four essential components of what a leader should be as evolved by Nerhru and his times. Democratic, secular, committed to a welfare state and committed to non-alignment. The last became a non-issue after 1991.

Vajpayee became the PM because Advani realised in 1995 that his hard Hindutva would not be acceptable to the people. He was outside the Nehruvian framework. So they got Vajpayee. What did Vajpayee say the moment he came into power? About Ayodhya, the most contentious issue, he said it will be resolved within the framework of the law. He was quiet about issues such as the uniform civil code.

When Vajpayee quit the scene and Advani became head of BJP he went to Pakistan and made the Jinnah statement. In March, at the National Council he said BJP should redefine its relationship with the minorities and he also said the party must form a charter of commitments for the minorities. Modi does not say all that.

He is not a democrat. He is a fairly autocratic person who believes in a top-down complete totalitarian style of functioning. He is not secular in the sense he does not believe that any special attempt should be made to carry the underprivileged or the religious minorities. On the welfare state he is very clear, distribution is incidental not integral. His India is more totalitarian than what it is, it is definitely clearly majoritarian, and not as democratic as it is now.

Will India tame Modi or Modi tame India?

I think the biggest contradiction would be that the middle-class, which now is the biggest supporter of Modi, will have the biggest problem if he comes to power. The middle-class loves its democracy.

There is a huge section of the middle-class, outside of Gujarat, which is a supporter of Modi for the wrong reasons. They feel Modi is more efficient. These are the people who would want to be rich and hate the poor. So they see Modi as enabling them to become richer and not get caught in the present bureaucratic red-tape. Modi’s style governance is a single-window operation.

Autocracy is going to seep in everywhere. It will eventually affect the middle-class also.

If Modi is not of the Nehruvian mould, what mould is he of?

He draws his core form the ideology of the Sangh Parivar. He believes in a very aggressive form a Hindutva. The idea of Hindutva predates the Sangh Parivar, pre-dates the RSS. Within the RSS, it is no longer one single voice. It is not a monolith like it used to be once. It is as much a saffron-coalition as the rainbow coalition that used to be behind the Congress.

You have Modi at the extreme saffron fringe, the most saffron. The least saffron would be those who came in from non-BJP non-Jan Sangh parties without any links to RSS – the likes of Jaswant Singh and Yaswant Sinha.

Is Advani going to a problem for Modi? What is, if at all ,the Advani threat?

Advani has a problem with what he feels has been denied to him by the political canvas of India. He feels that he should still get a shot at Prime Ministership. As long as he is politically active, it will be very difficult to dislodge him because Indians have a culture of respecting the elderly. That is going to a big problem for Modi. At the moment, it has worked because the RSS is solidly behind him (Modi) because they are of his generation. Mohan Bhagwat is the same age as Modi.

The Advani threat is that he can take away the moral authority of Modi. If Advani continues to sulk, he can take away the moral sheen from Modi who will be seen as someone who did something morally incorrect in Hindu culture, that he stabbed his guru in the back. Let us not forget, Modi was given his first break in national politics when Advani was party president. Modi wouldn’t have survived 2002 were it not for Advani.

Does Nitish Kumar pose a threat to Modi?

Nitish Kumar is more of a threat to Lalu than to the BJP. He wants OBC and the Muslim vote, especially the OBC Muslim vote. If Muslims aggregate behind Nitish, Lalu will be the loser. The biggest gainer in Bihar is the BJP.

But Nitish is perhaps the first CM to so publicly and openly confront Modi and his politics since the latter’s rise within the BJP?

He did it because he wanted to consolidate what he thinks is his future vote bank – the Muslims and the backwards.

He also spoke about an alternative development model.

Everyone talks about an alternative development model. Everyone is on a me-too agenda.

You think Nitish is non-issue for Modi.

I don’t think Modi would unnecessarily be worried about Nitish.

So what does Modi worry about? Does anything worry him?

Of course. He is a very insecure person. He is worried all the time. At the moment, his biggest worry would be getting his own political fraternity behind him. He is not looking in those areas where he doesn’t have a base at this time.

Does he like to read? Is he an intellectual?

He is not an intellectual, not according to me. The first requirement of an intellectual is to examine a position one doesn’t agree with, to listen to other opinions. The problem with Modi is that he doesn’t listen to any viewpoint other than his own. In that sense, he is not an intellectual the way we understand the word intellectual.

He reads, in the sense, he would be reading a lot on the Internet. He has Google alerts – Gujarat and Modi. He is very tech-savvy. A senior officer who has worked with him said he has an innate ability to convert somebody else’s knowledge into his own power. He does call subject experts, he uses them as sounding boards. But he ensures that they don’t go out and tell the world that Modi consulted them. He has exchanged letters with people. But they are extremely scared of sharing  those letters with anybody because of the Modi fear-factor.

What does he read?

I don’t think he gets to read much. He reads books on economics, environment, development. He likes reading about the environment. He would be reading them primarily on the Internet and he interacts with subject experts.

Does he write?

He writes a lot in Gujarati. He has written a lot of books in Gujarati. He wrote his first book in 1978 on Gujarat during the Emergency which has been recently translated to Hindi.

Has he made a conscious decision not speak in English?

He is not comfortable with English. He understands, of course. It is not his natural language.

Does he have a policy or vision for women?

He sees women as maata or behene. He sees women as mothers and sisters of the nation. He does not see women as equal partners in politics. If he places them in important positions, it would be to hold positions for him as a proxy.

Is the charge against Modi, that he is a marketing wonder, fair?

He is a great campaigner. He has a tremendous ability to micro-manage That is his strength. He has the capacity to kill himself with work. He tells me that he does yoga, follows a spartan diet. He doesn’t like very spicy food. He likes good clothes, expensive watches and spectacles. He is very particular about three things –how he looks, how he sounds, and his eyes. He drinks warm water. And when he speaks, he brings in his theatre training theatre. All that is fabricated. That is not the real Modi.

source:http://www.firstpost.com