CEO Modi must combine efficiency with empathy

The celebrations would have done a mega corporation proud. A day-long televised conference at a glass-fronted venue overlooking Delhi’s India Gate. A range of company directors making presentations on their respective departments. The grand finale: the CEO himself, addressing shareholders on the company’s determination to achieve greater profit and eliminate all rivals. Then, reality hit: of course this was not the two-year anniversary celebration of a business firm but a celebration of a government leading a democratic republic called India. The CEO was not the head of a company named BJP Pvt Ltd but the Prime Minister of all Indians, many of whom are crippled by severe drought.

Yet Modi sarkar makes its predecessor UPA look like a bewildered Diplodocus family from Jurassic Park. Government ads no longer have the kisan as their main face; instead a shirt-and-tie-wearing youth, a Modi Man from the aspirational neo-middle class, smiles into the camera, his backpack probably bursting with startup ideas and smartphones. Modi himself inaugurates an alliterative yojana a day and in contrast to the professorial bureaucrat Manmohan Singh, is the smartly dressed, energetic CEO-Prime Minister always in 24×7 campaign mode.

Modi’s CEO style combines a shakha-like regimentation and discipline married to a Singapore model of governance where efficient performance is demonstrated by rattling out figures on how many Jan Dhan Yojana accounts have been opened, how many villages have been electrified and how many LPG subsidies have been given up. From tweeting ministers to interactive websites, the marketing blitzkrieg is of a responsive, efficient government, abuzz with activity.

Yet something vital is missing. Is this government becoming a victim of digital vertigo, disconnected from the real world and imprisoned in virtual reality? Is the official narrative of achhe din determinedly wiping out any image that will besmirch the glittering façade? Modi Shining is a new concept in governance for sure: the focus is now on targets, not broad direction; on outcomes, not just outlays. Yet somehow the human factor is missing and there is a near-total absence of empathy.

Vikas is the holy grail, any virodh of vikas is unpatriotic. Yet the social agenda of the PM remains unknown. He barely speaks on Hindu-Muslim relations, or on Section 377, or on prohibition, or beef bans, or on activists offloaded from aircrafts; never shares what his views are on dissent or what his response is to criticism beyond occasionally dissing his critics. The determination to shut out all unappetizing controversies may be part of the achhe din hardsell, but is there no space in Modi’s vision for the jobless, the waterless, for those on the margins or those at the receiving end of violence? When a rights activist is offloaded from an aircraft, or an IAS officer transferred for an “anti-Modi” Facebook post, surely a democratic, modern PM must move to end the culture of fear? We see the PM embrace global celebrities, we have yet to see him embrace a drought-stricken farmer in Latur or a protesting student in Hyderabad.

Indian political leaders tend to wade into crowds. But for this government, mass contact is heavily mediated through technology and video conferencing, corporate style. Social media is abuzz with Modi’s messages, yet the PM is a remote, inaccessible figure, preferring a flood of tweets to a flesh-and-blood press conference. Indira Gandhi towered above her party not by physically placing herself at a distance but by rushing to the rescue of the Harijans of Belchi. Modi’s perfectly choreographed dynamo style is somehow antiseptic, devoid of real interactivity or spontaneity. Instead every event is planned to perfection.

The promised buzzword, reforms, appears to be a personal promise from Modi — things he will deliver through his own new schemes, not through a transformation of existing institutions. The state remains as much of a leviathan in citizens’ lives as it always was; there is no anecdotal evidence of a decline in retail corruption. Law and order may be spiffy around the PM, but on the street it is as lax as ever. Institutions are hardly becoming more accountable to the people, instead they seem to be getting more opaque. Clean stations don’t mean that the railways have suddenly become a transformed entity, and Air India still hasn’t become more passenger-friendly.

Modi’s CEO-style politics has an undeniably huge constituency and is his greatest strength, but could also become his biggest weakness. Amitabh Bachchan may anchor a Beti Padhao event but sex ratios are falling and crimes against women are rising. A water train to Latur is not even a medium-term solution. So instead of a corporate-style event at India Gate, imagine if the government had spent its second anniversary tackling water shortage across the country, every top minister stationed at a drought-hit zone.Now that really would have been achche din.

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