In nearly five years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule, interviews have been a rare occurrence. Since he took office in May 2014, Modi has not held a single press conference. His predecessor, Dr Manmohan Singh, had held three open media interactions during his two terms in office. Holding press conferences has been a tradition in India but Modi has refrained from it. Instead, he has given a few interviews to ‘friendly’ news organisations. Most of the interviews, dubbed as public relation exercise, were drab monologues. On January 1, the prime minister gave an interview to news agency ANI. It had a fair share of criticism and appreciation in mainstream media and received some ridicule on social media.
The Congress called it a ‘monologue’ and many twitter users mocked it, saying the prime minister made the conversation about himself. One twitter user called the interview Modi’s ‘Man Ki Baat’. Compared to Modi’s earlier interviews, his latest was little better, but still a prolonged monologue devoid of any diligent and persistent cross-questioning. Modi faced a host of questions on issues ranging from Ram temple, Rafale controversy, demonetisation, farm loan waivers, mob lynching, triple talaq, Sabarimala, BJP’s defeat in recent assembly elections, surgical strike, opposition alliance for 2019, the face-off between the government and the RBI and Urjit Patel’s resignation.
The questions were bit better, but the answers, as former diplomat K C Singh twitted, were mostly ‘what he (Modi) has been saying during campaign speeches, with some updating’. Like his earlier interviews which looked like a platform given to the prime minister to tackle slew of criticisms against his government, the January 1 interview also turned out to be yet another exercise which Modi used as a platform to address the perception that he is on the back foot. By choosing to relentlessly attack the Congress, he sought to dispel the doubt that he is no more in control of the political and economic narratives.
The interview has come at a time when the government is caught in a corner with allegations of corruption dominating the political discourse and is being attacked from all fronts for its failure to address rural distress, agrarian crisis and urban joblessness. But the prime minister, instead of answering questions forthrightly, chose to be flexible with facts on several key issues and gave indirect and clouded replies to accusations against his government.
The interview covered a lot of ground. But there were several questions that Modi chose not to answer adequately. Speaking about farm loans, Modi said that majority of farmers would not benefit from loan waivers, as only a small percentage of farmers take loans from banks, while the majority of them borrow from money lenders. However, according to an August 2018 National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development study, out of 52.5 per cent of the rural farming households which had an outstanding debt, only 11.5 per cent had borrowed from moneylenders. The prime reason behind the indebtedness was rising cost of capital expenditure for agriculture.
If bulk of farm loans are derived from non-banking sources, as claimed by the prime minister, then it is an indirect admission of failure of the government’s financial inclusion program through Jan Dhan Yojna that the government often takes pride in. Loan waiver is not a panacea for agriculture distress; it is largely a populist measure. But it’s not the Congress governments alone which have resorted to farm loan waivers but BJP state governments as well. However, the prime minister chose to criticize only the Congress governments by terming farm loan waivers as ‘lollipops’. He also did not specify any alternative mechanism to address agrarian distress.
Talking about triple talaq and Sabarimala, the prime minister said that while the Tripple Talaq Bill was about social justice and equality, Sabarimala is a matter of tradition. When the SC struck down both as regressive traditions, can gender equality be judged differently for the minority and majority communities? When quizzed about demonetisation, the prime minister said that there was a parallel economy running before the note ban, which had drained the country from inside. The currency which used to be kept in sacks, he added, has returned to the banking system.
However, note ban was supposed to extinguish black currency in circulation and the expectation from demonetisation was that at least 3 to 4 lakh crore of banned currency would not come back into the banking system. But according to August 2018 RBI annual report, almost all of demonetised currency (99.3 per cent) had returned back into the system. Thus, demonetisation was a complete failure because it did not flush out black money, or attack black wealth. But neither the prime minister, nor the government wants to admit it.
When asked about Rafale controversy, Modi said that the SC has given his government a clean chit in the matter. While the SC went into the administrative process of the deal, it did not go into the details of pricing. The prime minister did not say why the government went ahead for only 36 aircrafts at a much higher price by junking the earlier deal for 136 aircrafts. He was also silent about awarding the offset contract to a private entity which has no experience in defence. Talking about mob lynching, the prime minister expressed his anguish at the rising level of violence but added that it wasn’t as if such incidents started only after 2014.
The fact is that during five years of UPA-2, there was not a single case of lynching related to cow vigilantism, while there have been 37 murders since 2014 in such incidents. Modi was also silent about his own ministers honouring accused and convicts of cow lynching cases. He also did not give any commitment on taking strong action against mob lynching. Speaking about the resignation of former RBI governor Urjit Patel, Modi said that he quit because of personal reasons and had made a request in writing.
But he did not say a word about the face-off between the government and the RBI over the issue of reserves, invoking of Section 7 of the RBI act and the demand for relaxing of lending norms for PSU banks, which led to Patel’s resignation. On most questions, Modi either carefully sidestepped crucial facts or chose to be flexible with them. It is for this reason that Rahul Gandhi termed the interview as ‘staged’, while rebel BJP MP Shatrughan Sinha called it a ‘well scripted, choreographed, well researched and rehearsed TV interview’.
A L I Chougule is an independent senior journalist.