[His bristles have mainly shown in the arena of foreign
affairs. Last week, Mr. Modi was faced with a snap decision during a rare visit
by the Chinese president, an event he hosted on his birthday, choreographed to
cast the two leaders as potential partners. Chinese officials had dangled an
investment package of as much as $100 billion, but as the two men sat down to
dinner, Chinese and Indian troops
were facing off against
each other in the highlands of Ladakh, Kashmir ,
near the disputed border between the two nations.]
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi
of
celebrations last month in
|
The message was received. Mr. Modi, who is famously
austere in his own habits, intends to impose discipline.
The United States New York Washington
The visit is a big moment for Mr. Modi, who offers
himself as a metaphor for the India
In the four months since he has taken office, Mr. Modi
has disappointed those who were hoping for an Indian Margaret Thatcher, proving
to be cautious and incremental in his use of economic policy. Instead, he has
set about changing the architecture of the state, diluting the powers of
ministries and concentrating them in his office. Mr. Modi is building a machine
for governing, one that he intends to operate for a long time.
It is not yet clear whether he can pull it off. To
succeed, Mr. Modi must bring about fundamental changes in India ’s economy and steer a stable course in a country prone
to incendiary conflicts. Observers here, surveying still-unfilled positions in
his government, wonder whether Mr. Modi will be able to trust outsiders enough
to bring in policy talent. And critics say his concentrated power will make it
more difficult for his own officials to question him.
M. J. Akbar, a spokesman for Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party,
dismissed those worries, saying Mr. Modi’s early moves aimed at “setting the
rules for his own government” and putting an end to a bureaucratic culture so loose that officials “used to tweet and send
SMS’s in the middle of a cabinet meeting.”
The prime minister, Mr. Akbar said, “is just a tough guy.
Delhi hasn’t seen a tough guy in a long time.”
On the day Mr. Modi was endorsed as prime minister, he
stood before Parliament and seemed
close to tears, promising to focus his attention on “rural areas,
farmers, untouchables, the weak and the pained,” because “our weakest, our
poorest have sent us here.”
This was a new tone for Mr. Modi. His reputation had
preceded him to New
Delhi : His rise
through his own party proved him a ruthless political operator, capable of
deftly sidelining well-established older leaders. An angry presence during the
campaign, he had been championed by right-wing economists as someone prepared
to slash away at the country’s gargantuan subsidy programs.
Since taking office, though,
Mr. Modi has presented a softer face to the country, guided by a populist’s
unerring instinct for his audience. In his major addresses, delivered without
notes and in earthy, colloquial Hindi, he has spoken as a kindly moral
instructor, focusing on such humble causes as the need to build toilets. Last
week, perhaps responding to calls to move more quickly on reforms, Mr. Modi
said he naturally gravitated to practical matters.
“There have been discussions
about vision, about big vision and grand vision,” he said, in comments
published by The Indian Express. “I only want to say that I am a small person,
and I think about small people. By thinking small for small people I am trying
to make them grow. Nobody was thinking about these small people.”
His bristles have mainly shown in the arena of foreign
affairs. Last week, Mr. Modi was faced with a snap decision during a rare visit
by the Chinese president, an event he hosted on his birthday, choreographed to
cast the two leaders as potential partners. Chinese officials had dangled an
investment package of as much as $100 billion, but as the two men sat down to
dinner, Chinese and Indian troops
were facing off against
each other in the highlands of Ladakh, Kashmir ,
near the disputed border between the two nations.
With little time to decide, Mr. Modi took the unusual
step of publicly prodding his Chinese guest over the border issue at a news
conference, a moment that cast a shadow over the message of deepening trade.
Speaking of India in a recent interview with CNN, Mr. Modi made it clear
that his goal was a historic restoration. “This is a country that once upon a
time was called the golden bird,” he said. . “We have fallen from where we were
before. But now we have the chance to rise again.”
Mr. Modi’s toughness is certainly visible in New Delhi , a city where power has long been distributed among a
constellation of heavyweight ministers, editors and business tycoons.
That balance has begun to change. Nearly every week
during his early months in office, a new rumor began to circulate, each with
the subtext that Mr. Modi and his team were keeping a close watch on officials.
One described a minister who received a call from the prime minister’s office
on a Friday, was told the exact number of unapproved files sitting on his desk,
and was so unnerved that he worked all weekend to clear the files, one after
another.
Party officials would not confirm or deny these reports
but acknowledged that officials were under scrutiny. “That officials are being
monitored? Yes. Is their behavior being monitored? Yes,” said Akhilesh Mishra,
a Bharatiya Janata Party activist who worked as a strategist for the
parliamentary campaign. The reports, he said, come from “a vast network of
people, people who give a feedback mechanism.”
Week by week, Mr. Modi has
built up the prime minister’s office into a dominant force in government.
First, cabinet officials were discouraged from speaking to the news media
without permission. Ministers were barred from hiring personal staff members
without approval.
And unlike his predecessors,
Mr. Modi is said to be making many appointments himself. Senior officials,
speaking on the condition of anonymity, complained to The Hindustan Times that
the government had begun to circulate the agenda for cabinet meetings just
hours before it was to begin, making it nearly impossible for them to fully
participate in policy making.
“Even in Indira Gandhi’s time,
you had advisers who were very powerful, they were larger than life and capable
of giving input,” said Siddharth Varadarajan, a journalist and senior fellow at
Shiv Nadar University
Journalists now have virtually no opportunity to ask
questions of top officials. As the Editors Guild of India complained in a
letter published Tuesday, much of the bureaucracy has gone silent, and journalists
have found themselves scrambling to get even basic information from the prime
minister’s office, which has yet to appoint a contact person for the news
media.
This is, on one hand, a way of ensuring that payoffs are
not offered or received. It also gives corporate leaders the sense that they
are being kept at arm’s length, at least for the moment, said one executive
from a large Indian company, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“Is Modi taking the demonstrative step of being wary of
industry?” the executive said. “If that’s just messaging, it’s also risky,
because you are almost sending the message that industry is the cause of
corruption. If he actually believes it, that’s terrible. Even if it’s just
signaling, that’s bad enough.”
Mr. Modi’s supporters say his centralization of authority
has begun to yield results: Ministries that previously worked as independent
fiefs have fallen in line, and long-delayed projects have begun to move. India ’s economy is showing signs of a revival, growing at an
annualized rate of 5.7 percent in the first quarter of the year, after
languishing under 5 percent for nearly two years.
But Mr. Modi’s time to make decisions is limited, and a
backlog is said to be piling up. A surprising number of senior positions remain
unfilled — notably, that of defense minister, despite this government’s keen
focus on defense. Arun Jaitley, a veteran lawmaker close to Mr. Modi, is
temporarily serving as both finance minister and defense minister.
In some cases, the difficulty may be in identifying
outside experts who are fully trusted by Mr. Modi’s team. But that, said an
analyst who consulted with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s parliamentary campaign,
is hardly surprising — Mr. Modi has never depended much on any one aide or
adviser.
“He is his own master completely,” the analyst said,
speaking on the condition of anonymity. “He has no problem seeking advice or
talking to people. In terms of trust, I don’t think 100 percent he trusts
anybody.”
