Opinion Prime Ministering

A day after he picked up the broom and administered a pledge to launch the Swachh Bharat campaign on October 2, Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared his “man ki baat” with the nation, on All India Radio. In the 15-minute address, which is slated to become a fortnightly event, he again called on the people to join the cleanliness campaign, asked them to buy khadi and spoke about what society owes children with special needs. Earlier, on Teachers’ Day last month, the PM had reached out to schoolgoing children, exhorting them to study and play hard while thinking about how they can save water and electricity and mitigate the global energy crisis. In between, he gave a rousing call at another public function featuring a bespoke slogan and symbol to entrepreneurs to “make in India”. If there is a distinctive pattern so far to the Modi prime ministership, it is this: his pursuit of the obvious and the unexceptionable, his attempt to pick the high-reaching but low-hanging fruit, framed in a one-man, one-way, top-down campaign.

There were intimations of his style. The Modi campaign for the parliamentary elections carried a similar imprint and design and in a sense, his government has only followed suit. For now, there is also a receptive context. The Modi communication blitz is filling a gap. It comes on the heels of two terms of a government that was seen to be remote and uncommunicative. The Manmohan Singh government appeared reluctant to take ownership of even its own flagship schemes — in many cases, allowing opposition-led state governments to run away with the credit for them — and its tenure was characterised by a growing dissonance between an increasingly assertive and demanding electorate and an apparently unmoved and unresponsive top leadership. In this scenario, Modi’s communication drive, even overdrive, would appear to be a much-needed outreach.

Advertisement

Yet, effective governance is also about empowering institutions, improving processes and bringing structural reforms. It involves the addressing of complex issues and demands for transformations that take longer and are harder to achieve and which must address the tangled and congealed realities of class and caste. There will be difficult choices and trade-offs on the way, and the imperatives will not always be as conflict-free as “Clean India” or “Make in India”. By placing himself at the centre, by putting his imprimatur on every initiative, Modi makes it look too easy. He could be raising and pandering to false expectations about how a system functions — and, more importantly, how it can change.