Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s terror is visible in New Delhi’s corridors of power. Ministers and top bureaucrats are nothing but glorified conveyor belts. Everything is being micro-managed from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
In fact, the PMO is all-powerful. It is a Super PMO, the like of which was probably last seen in the history of independent India during Emergency, the 21-month period from June 25 1975 to March 21 1977 when Indira Gandhi was the premier. But wait! Before you jump to any conclusions the example of Emergency has been given just to indicate the unbridled powers of Modi’s PMO and nothing more. Modi’s PMO is starkly different, minus the draconian measures that were implemented in a dictatorial manner during the Emergency, a blot on Indian democracy.
The intentions of the Modi government are rather laudable, though it will depend on how the people at large and the affected persons, including ministers and bureaucrats, look at the new rules. Days after Modi was sworn in as India’s 14th premier on May 26, he issued gag orders on all his ministers and were told to avoid the media like plague. Modi’s mantra is that the media needs him and he does not need the media. However on special occasions, this rule will be relaxed like the multiple media outreach programs that the government is planning on Sept. 3 when it completes 100 days in office. But in that scenario too the ministers or top bureaucrats or respective ministries’ spokespersons would be dishing out to the media only that much which the PMO has approved.
Insiders say that PMO staffers have never seen a work machine like Modi. In fact, PMO staffers wonder when the PM sleeps. Modi’s conduct is invariably like the royal executives depicted in the Arabian Nights. Stumped! Here is how. He has the habit of surprising his ministers with his phone calls. First of all, he routinely calls up his ministers on the landline early in the morning. That is obviously to know whether his commanders in the political battle he is waging against his innumerable enemies have reached their workstations or not.
He does not spare anybody. In one such instance, he called up the office landline number of his most trusted minister Arun Jaitley, just when the office hours had begun. Jaitley was not in office. But his alert staff tipped him about the call from the PM and Jaitley rang him back.
Jaitley asked him whether anything was amiss and in the process told him that since he was under medication he was working from home. Jaitley is a heart patient, having undergone major cardiac surgeries at least twice. Because of his health condition, Jaitley had to opt out of Modi’s trip to Brazil for attending the BRICS summit at the eleventh hour and Minister of State for Commerce and Industry Nirmala Sitharaman had to fill in for him.
Such is the Modi terror that government officials, irrespective of their rank, have started reporting for work on time. This is something that was visible the last time around in the history of independent India only during the infamous Emergency. Moreover, the Modi fear is stalking the senior bureaucrats so much that they use mobile phones of their aides for intimate conversations and are afraid of using their own phones, fearing that their phones are being tapped.
The underlying theme of such gag orders is driven by Modi’s biggest fear of a corruption scandal rocking his government. He is shrewd enough to know that he is adorning the PM’s chair not as much because of his own work but because of the bad work of the previous government, which got sunk only because of its poor record about corruption issues. Now Modi’s PMO is deploying CCTV cameras in all sensitive ministries to ensure that all government servants focus on their work and improve their delivery quotient. With this micro-management, Modi is implementing his pet ideas of zero-corruption and “minimum government-maximum governance.”
Journalists can no longer have a free run of the ministries and many ministries have passed express orders to regulate journalists’ entries into the ministries. Even at those places where journalists are allowed in, they are supposed to go through the drill of leaving back their mobile phones and even pens before they meet the officials. This is to pre-empt Modi’s ministers from being subjected to sting operations by unknown visitors, often disguised as journalists. This is Modi’s biggest fear: Any of his ministers becoming the target of a sting operation. Modi’s USP for the Indian masses is not governance or effective governance or delivery of the BJP’s big-ticket promises mentioned in the BJP manifesto. His biggest fear is a high-decibel corruption scandal breaking out. That is why all this concerted choreography from the Modi PMO.
