The Modi Question

Eight years into his rule India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is finally feeling the heat. 

It has not been a happy new year for Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party. In January the BBC released the first episode of its two-part documentary titled ‘India: The Modi Question’. The first part of the documentary was an investigation into the role of Modi, then chief minister of the state of Gujarat, in the pogrom of minority Muslims in 2002. The second examined his government’s antagonistic relationship with the Muslim community and his party’s role in the Delhi riots of 2022. A ban followed quickly. The government ordered YouTube and Twitter to take down all links to the documentary.

Four days later came a bombshell in the form of the Hindenburg Report on Modi’s close friend Gautam Adani’s gigantic empire. The US based short seller Hindenburg published an investigative report on the Adani group of companies, accusing it of accounting fraud and stock manipulation. Adani shares plummeted overnight, and his net worth fell below US$ 50 billion over the next weeks. From being Asia’s richest man and the third richest man in the world, his position fell to 25th on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List.

In mid February the billionaire George Soros told an audience at the Munich Security Conference that the Hindenberg allegations could hurt investor confidence and weaken Modi. “Modi and business tycoon Adani are close allies; their fate is intertwined,” he said. He added, “This will significantly weaken Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government and open the door to push for much-needed institutional reforms. I may be naive, but I expect a democratic revival in India.”

The Modi government and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s response to all these developments was predictable. Muscular nationalism was in evidence, as ministers, government spokesmen and the party’s ecosystem went into overdrive. A party spokesman famously termed the BBC the “most corrupt organisation in the world” (Bhrasht, Bakwaas Corporation)! He also accused it of “venomous, shallow and agenda-driven reporting.”  

A government spokesman said, “This is a propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative. The bias, the lack of objectivity and a continuing colonial mindset is blatantly visible.” BJP supporters alleged the documentary was part of an international conspiracy to discredit India at a time when its influence on the world stage is growing, it reflected Hinduphobia and had been made at the bidding of China. A right-wing extremist group, the Hindu Sena, tried to get the Supreme Court to ban the documentary but the Court dismissed their plea. The government was able to use the IT Rules, 2021 to demand that social media platforms take down the documentary but, of course, no ban can be effective in the age of the Internet.      

On Valentine's Day the government gave the BBC a gift: a three-day long ‘survey’ of BBC offices by the Income Tax department. Indians are familiar with such raids by government agencies and made the obvious link between the Modi documentary and this move. Most people view such actions as a form of harassment, with files being scrutinised, laptops and phones being seized as ‘evidence’ and staff being interrogated at length. The raid in the BBC’s Mumbai office went on for two nights and three days, with some staff detained in the office for the entire period. A similar ‘survey’ took place at the Delhi office. 

India’s media has suffered its share of such investigations. The list is a long one. 

In June 2017 the Central Bureau of Investigation raided the homes and offices of Prannoy and Radhika Roy, co-founders of the news channel NDTV, alleging a bank loan fraud that the Roys denied. Investigations by the Income Tax department and the Enforcement Directorate had commenced in 2014, the year that the BJP came to power.

In February 2021 the small, independent site NewsClick was raided by the Enforcement Department. Both its office and the homes of some staffers were raided. Officials entered the home of the editor/owner and stayed there for four days, ‘investigating’ his electronic devices. The editor and his wife, both in their 70s, were confined in the house during this entire period. 

In July 2021 the widely read Hindi language newspaper Dainik Bhaskar offices in several cities were raided by the Income Tax department after it carried investigative stories about mass Covid deaths in Uttar Pradesh and other states, questioning government data on the deaths. 

In June and September 2021 the website Newslaundry was raided by Income Tax officials, the editor’s personal phone and laptop and some office machines were taken control of and the data on them downloaded. No hash value was provided, according to the editor. (Hash values reveal any later attempt to tamper with a device or plant information in it.) 

In October 2022 police raided the homes of three editors of the alternative news site The Wire and seized many phones and laptops. They reportedly asked for passwords to the electronic devices and refused to provide the hash value. They also demanded the passwords to e-mail accounts. 

The BBC’s official reaction to the raids was circumspect: it advised all staff to cooperate with the officials. Subsequently, the Income Tax authorities accused the BBC of not reporting certain incomes and profits and not paying tax on these remittances. The BBC will, in all likelihood, appeal against these charges.    

The BBC documentary was taken down by the government under the IT Rules, 2021. These Rules seem to be aimed at controlling the social media, particularly the mushrooming YouTube channels started by independent individual journalists. Many of them have been eased out of the pro-government TV channels but have dedicated fan followings. Increasingly people are turning away from the big media to watch these indie journos and small, independent news sites for news, views and debates. The government is planning further curbs on digital media.   

India’s mainstream media is largely owned by big capitalists who support the Modi government. Mukesh Ambani’s mega Reliance group has substantial investments in TV companies. In December 2022 NDTV, the network that liberals considered the last bastion of independent media, was bought up by Gautam Adani. The TV channels are overwhelmingly pro-Modi and are dubbed as ‘Godi media’ or ‘Modi media’. The credibility of this big media is at an all-time low, as it vociferously voices official propaganda and deliberately spreads Islamophobia. The government’s massive advertisement budget, doled out judiciously to media companies, ensures their support for and even adulation of the prime Minister. 

Indians have long viewed the foreign media, particularly the BBC, as more credible than the ‘Godi media’ and the state-owned media. This was one of the reasons for some interest in the documentary. Ironically, for most Indians the first part of the BBC series revealed nothing new. Over the past twenty odd years the Gujarat riots have been reported, debated and discussed extensively and the Supreme Court has exonerated Narendra Modi of most charges against him. The documentary could have gone unnoticed, unsung but for the ill-advised government ban which aroused a huge interest in it.     

Student groups immediately began to organise screenings of the documentary on several university campuses, downloading it from various sites. The authorities, predictably, tried all sorts of tricks and tactics to prevent screenings. 

In Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University and Ambedkar University there were mysterious power cuts when screenings started. In the Jamia Millia Islamia University several students were detained by police hours before the screening was to begin. At the Delhi University the police forcibly pushed many students into a bus and took them away to prevent screening. Students were suspended at the Central University of Rajasthan. At Himachal Pradesh University police stopped a screening. At Hyderabad University, a right-wing group tried to disrupt the screening. 

At the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai the authorities warned students not to screen the film. A right-wing student group gathered outside the campus to prevent it being shown but police stopped them from entering the campus. Students at the Film & Television Institute in Pune were able to watch the documentary.  At Kolkata’s Presidency University there was a sudden power cut but screening resumed after protests; at Jadavpur University the screening went off peacefully. The controversy made many young people download, share and learn about one of the ugliest periods in recent history, an inconvenient history that the BJP wishes to forget.    

While the government tries to battle public opinion on this front, it is also having to simultaneously counter the Opposition’s attacks on the Adani affair.

Adani’s links with Modi are an open secret. In 2014 when Modi came to Delhi as Prime Minister designate, after a landslide election victory, he arrived in a plane owned by Adani. Photographs of Modi descending from the plane, with the Adani name emblazoned across the private jet, surfaced once again as the Opposition parties launched an attack on the Adani-Modi combine.

As all hell broke out on the Indian stock market, the Congress Party began asking sharp questions in Parliament and other fora about how many times Adani had accompanied Modi on trips abroad and how many contracts had been secured by the Adani group from the countries visited. Old reports surfaced on a controversial deal to supply coal to Sri Lanka’s state-owned power company, on another deal to sell overpriced electricity to Bangladesh, on the Carmichael mine matter in Australia…. Reports came in about the 38 odd shell companies allegedly set up by the Adanis in Mauritius and rumours about round- tripping of money followed. 

Questions were raised on the ways in which rules were circumvented or flouted to give the Adanis massive local contracts including the rights to manage seven airports and 13 seaports. Worries were raised about the losses to the publicly owned Life Insurance Corporation that had invested in Adani companies. Fears grew about the size of the Adani debt, with the State Bank of India alone having lent US $ 2.6 billion to Adani group companies. Suspicions arose about the phenomenal rise of the Adani group – in 2020 the Financial Times had estimated that Adani’s wealth had grown 230% since Modi came to office.

Modi has remained silent on all these allegations. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s charges have been conveniently expunged from the Parliamentary record. However, it is not as easy to expunge the opinions of persons such as George Soros.

Soros’ scathing observations have led to angry counter accusations. Foreign Affairs Minister S.Jaishankar has hit out at Soros, calling him “an old, rich opinionated person sitting in New York who still thinks that his views should determine how the entire world works.” He deems Soros “dangerous”. And Minority Affairs Minister Smriti Irani claims that a “war is being mounted on India” with Soros trying to destabilise the Modi government through a billion dollar fund. “The man who broke the Bank of England. A man who is known and designated as an economic war criminal by a nation has now pronounced his desire to break Indian democracy,” she has said.

Clearly the Modi government finds itself beleaguered, facing an avalanche of embarrassments and accusations. It will continue to ban and harass any media that raises inconvenient questions but cannot totally silence it. And it is spinning a counter-narrative, seeking cover under the familiar old cloak of hyper-nationalism. The question remains, can it sell this narrative once again to India’s impoverished, barely literate masses?

Sujata Madhok is General Secretary of the Delhi Union of Journalists.