The Prime Minister is upset and demands accountability, read the headlines last week amid a raging controversy over the corruption-in-judiciary section in a Class 8 book. “Kaun dekh rahaa hai ye sab (who is looking after all this)?” a government source quoted an angry Modi as saying to NDTV.
These headlines and quotes drew a somewhat queer reaction from the chatterati: “So, Sonia is upset.” It was a sardonic attempt to draw a parallel with the Manmohan Singh era. The headlines in those days — from 2004 to 2014 — would regularly say how then Congress president Sonia Gandhi was unhappy, upset, perturbed, or miffed with something or the other done by the government. It reinforced the Gandhi family’s primacy over the government, kept ministers and the PMO on a short leash, and shielded the Gandhis from any accountability in case there was a backlash against any seemingly unpopular or unseemly government decision.
Such headlines stopped after May 2014. There was no ‘Super PM’ to seek accountability from the Prime Minister or his ministers. The issue of accountability never arose after that — not when hundreds died in train accidents, not when dozens lost their lives in terror attacks, communal riots, or a railway station stampede, and not even when India faced international embarrassment due to massive mismanagement at the AI Impact Summit, made only worse by the Chinese robodog controversy.
There was no need to seek answers from ministers in the last 12 years or thereabouts because the Opposition Congress was always there to be held accountable for its acts of omission and commission since Independence. And if these acts of the distant past started triggering ennui among the people, the Congress could be counted on to provide fresh ammunition. See, for instance, how the Prime Minister is repeatedly holding the Opposition accountable for defaming India through their shirtless protests at the AI summit.
So what has happened suddenly? Why is PM Modi suddenly upset with his ministers? It cannot be Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s sharp reaction to the corruption-in-judiciary section in a school book. He is the least of the government’s worries, as it is. It was not even about the political fallout. The University Grants Commission’s new anti-discrimination regulations were politically more damaging, as upper-caste leaders of even the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party decried them. Even then, the PM was not upset and did not seek accountability.
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Communication breakdown
The fact is that the PM-Modi-is-upset narrative is a communication disaster. It amounts to suggesting that PM Modi is not in complete control of his government, and that his ministers and officials are running the show as they deem fit. The public perception that not a needle moves in the government without the sanction of the Prime Minister’s Office goes with PM Modi’s image as the man in total control. To suggest that he was upset because he was caught unawares by changes in a school textbook hurts that image. It is certainly preposterous to even think that the Prime Minister should know every little thing in the government. But that’s how his image has been built.
The upset-Modi narrative is yet another manifestation of the PM’s communication and optics team losing its mojo. Think of the Union Cabinet passing a resolution pledging to take all decisions in the interest of 140 crore people. The social media backlash, questioning whose interest the Cabinet had served until now, was no surprise. Whoever came up with this idea of this pledge had to be a genius. And whoever advised minister Hardeep Puri to address a press conference to give clarification about his name figuring in Epstein files didn’t really help his cause. When was the last time a minister in the Modi-led Cabinet went beyond summary rejections of charges to give such detailed defence against the Opposition’s allegations? Thanks to his press conference, the allegations, which were limited to some Opposition leaders’ X posts until then, dominated headlines for days.
It is nobody’s case that the minister should not have responded to the Opposition’s allegations. But that’s not exactly this government’s style. It prefers to simply ignore allegations and let the issue die.
These are only the recent instances. The cracks in the BJP’s communication strategy started appearing even before the 2024 Lok Sabha election, when it failed to counter the Opposition’s ‘Save Constitution’ campaign. Again, think of how the government’s communication managers bungled things during Operation Sindoor, allowing TV channels and social media right-wingers to dictate the narrative. Op Sindoor was a big success, but it didn’t trigger the kind of mass celebration the BJP might have expected.
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There are many, many other instances of the BJP’s and the government’s communication managers — in the Prime Minister’s Office and outside — losing the plot. They are obviously running out of ideas and imagination after 12 years.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time. US President Donald Trump’s mercurial and unpredictable moves are threatening to scuttle the Vishwaguru narrative, even though the Modi government has held its nerve so far. PM Modi’s corruption jibes at the Opposition are losing sting, with the central investigation agencies coming a cropper in high-profile cases involving Opposition leaders. The acquittal of former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and 22 others in the alleged liquor scam case is only the latest. Only last week, the Punjab and Haryana High Court discharged former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and Associated Journal Ltd., publisher of the National Herald newspaper, in the land allotment case.
It also does not help the BJP’s case when a minister in the Modi-led Cabinet, Jitan Ram Majhi, admits to taking commissions from constituency development funds and even recommends the same to other leaders. Only last week, a BJP minister in the Yogi Adityanath government, Dinesh Pratap Singh, questioned raids by the Income Tax department against a Bahujan Samaj Party MLA, wondering if they were a result of “political vendetta”.
The BJP’s communication team has gone just silent about it, letting people draw their own conclusions. There are many other challenges the Modi government might face in the coming weeks and months — the next being the expected inking of the Indo-US trade deal, against which the Opposition has launched a campaign, calling it anti-farmer.
PM Modi remains popular even in his 12th year in office, but the BJP can’t afford to lose what is one of its biggest strengths — communication and optics management. This is the last thing PM Modi needs in his third term.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)