On 16 May 2014, India’s new prime minister, Narendra Modi, entered the record books, after the most extraordinary general election campaign in his country’s history. His had been a remarkable victory, not just by the standards of Indian democracy, but worthy of comparison with some of the greatest electoral triumphs anywhere in the world. By virtue of the mandate he had been given, Modi was now one of the most powerful men on the international stage. And yet until very recently he had been a virtual pariah, refused entry to the United States as a religious extremist and frozen out diplomatically by Britain, the European Union and many other western countries. His in-box was overflowing; he would face enormous challenges if he was to go anywhere near meeting the expectations he had raised on the campaign trail. But just eight weeks after taking office he made time to meet me – a foreigner with no particular expertise in Indian politics, but with a fascination for elections and respect for politicians with the vision and determination to break the mould, defy conventional wisdom and shake off old prejudices. I have been in and around politics too long to be much in awe of prime ministers and presidents. I have been fortunate enough to meet, chat with, interview, and in one case work for, some of the greats. Tony Blair (my old boss), Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton; they had all overcome their opponents and won elections that had at one time appeared beyond their grasp or that of their parties. All told, I suppose I must have encountered twenty or more heads of government in my career, first as a journalist and then in politics. Almost without exception, whether I agreed with what they stood for or not, I found them fascinating as people. It takes somebody quite exceptional to work their way to the top with all the sacrifices that are required along the way. Of all of them, Narendra Modi, who I first set eyes on in person in July 2014, is without doubt the most intriguing and the hardest to fathom. To anybody used to British politics, the way things are done in India is at times very familiar and at others a world apart. Trying to compare Modi with prime ministers closer to home is fraught with complications, but the reasons for trying are obvious. He won a thumping victory at the polls and was thrust into the global spotlight where he stood proudly in front of an audience who knew little about him except, perhaps, by reputation. Over the coming months I was to spend several hours in his company as well as meeting many others who had worked with him, or studied him, closely. At the end of it all, I still couldn’t be sure I understood him fully, but I was more convinced than ever that he merited scrutiny. From what I had seen and read, it was clear that if anybody is a full-time, 24/7 politician, it is Narendra Modi. He appears to allow nothing to distract him from the task in hand. He is a teetotal, celibate vegetarian. There are no sports, no hobbies, no family ties. He sleeps only four or five hours a night, and never takes a day off or goes on vacation. When he does do something that isn’t directly work-related – as with his daily yoga and meditation routines – it is simply to make him more productive and effective for the rest of the day. I wasn’t sure if all that was admirable or slightly disturbing. The only way to find out was to meet him. I’d been to Delhi several times over the years and wandered around the imposing government buildings, designed a century ago by the British architects Sir Herbert Baker and Sir Edwin Lutyens. But the prime minister’s residence at 7 Race Course Road, where I was now sitting, is not on the tourist trail. Unlike 10 Downing Street, where I used to work, or the White House, it can’t be seen from the street. India has lost two post-Independence prime ministers, Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv, to political assassinations, and security is as tight here as around any leader I have met before. There are the usual scanner and body searches, but before you can gain access to the inner sanctum, you must hand over every conceivable electronic device and allow yourself to be driven in a special car to the low building where the PM lives and receives visitors. It is a relatively plain property looking out over some well-tended gardens, where peacocks strut about purposefully far from public view. The toilets, something the building has in common with Downing Street, are rather rudimentary and reminiscent of the lavatories at school or in a small town museum. On the wall outside the building, the plaque still bore the name of the outgoing prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh. Nobody had yet got round to changing it. Modi said to me later that he hadn’t altered anything else either. The paintings on the walls, the furniture, the rugs were all exactly as Dr Singh had left them. ‘Honestly, I do not feel I am the PM even today,’ he told me. ‘Temperamentally, I am a very detached person and it has become increasingly so over the past years.’ The waiting room was spacious, which was just as well as there seemed to be a lot of people with appointments to see him. There was the usual stack of newspapers and magazines, many of them, I noticed, with articles asking where Modi had disappeared to since the election and why there hadn’t already been more signs of progress. I chatted politely with the others in the room, including the foreign minister, Mrs Sushma Swaraj. The conversation took an unusual turn when we were joined by a tall man in white robes with the Hindu tilak, a red dot and horizontal line, painted on his forehead. He was a holy man and an astrologer and, without prompting, offered some predictions, all of them flattering, for most of us in the room. I would achieve three great things in life, he told me, apparently solely on the basis of how I was sitting and holding my hands. But I was more interested in what he had seen in Mr Modi’s future. Using the suffix ‘ji’ as a mark of respect, he told me, ‘Modiji will be a great leader.’ Well that would have come as no surprise to the man then sitting in his reception room just down the corridor. He has no shortage of people to tell him that and he clearly shares the opinion. But the guru’s foresight was a lot more precise. Modi would be in power until 2032, with only a short break in opposition. Most of that time he would have an absolute majority in parliament, only once having to work in coalition with other parties. For all I knew, this holy man’s meeting with the prime minister had nothing to do with his astrological skills, but his appearance was a useful reminder to me of something I was becoming increasingly aware of about Indian politics. There is only so far you can go in trying to understand it through the prism of western political norms. Even before I first set eyes on Modi, I knew I would have to strive to take the measure of him according to standards of behaviour and forms of expression that were quite different to what I had been used to elsewhere. What sounds boastful or over the top to a western ear, for example, is often perfectly acceptable in an Indian context. We have got used to mistrusting and denigrating almost everything our leaders try to tell us. That level of cynicism bordering on contempt has not yet polluted the Indian political system to the same degree. Leaders are listened to with respect and the informality of British politics – ‘call me Tony’, and so on – is all but absent here. I’m not sure I succeeded entirely, but in my conversations with Narendra Modi I did my best to listen politely to what he had to say, and to bite my tongue when the temptation arose to respond with ‘oh, come off it’, as it sometimes did. And so while Ronald Reagan was mocked for taking advice from his wife’s astrologer, my Indian friends told me nobody in their country would share my surprise that I bumped into one. I know from bitter experience working as a spokesman for Tony Blair that any suggestion a British prime minister (or his wife) had been mixing with some kind of guru would lead to paroxysms of derision in the media. Not so in India. Here mysticism and religion are highly visible threads running through the political fabric. And even concepts that seem at first sight to translate into our way of thinking – like secularism and communalism, to take two highly pertinent examples in Modi’s story – have significantly different meanings. All of which raised another question. Why was I sitting in that waiting room at all? Modi had agreed to give me unprecedented access to help me analyse the campaign that had brought him to power. No other writer, Indian or foreign, was to be allowed the same privilege. Of all the requests for interviews he had received, to agree to mine was, on the face of it, an improbable choice. He arguably deserves credit for having the self-confidence to talk so openly with somebody who is not an ideological soulmate. My politics has always been left of centre and my instincts liberal. It is not hard to find people who readily define Modi as an extremist, a demagogue, even occasionally a fascist. It is fair to say that if I had a vote in the Indian general election of 2014, I would not have cast it for Narendra Modi or his party. There are a number of reasons why he might have chosen to speak to me, and at such length. A wish to have his success better recognised on the international stage is certainly one. Perhaps a desire to be compared alongside the likes of Tony Blair and Barack Obama as a consummate genius of electoral tactics is another. But I think most important of all was that I came with no prejudices or preconceptions, save perhaps for my liberalism. In India Modi is such a huge figure that everybody has made up his or her mind about him. He is revered and adored by many; loathed and feared by others. There are very few ‘don’t-knows’ in Indian politics today. The time to meet the object of all those strong emotions had finally arrived. A man in a white uniform appeared, bowed and indicated that I should follow him. The tall double doors at the end of the corridor were opened; at the far end of the room I could see Modi sitting in a hard-backed chair with a small table beside him on which there was a telephone, a glass of water and a pile of papers with his glasses on top. He shook my hand firmly and indicated that I should sit in the other identical chair alongside him. I’d been told that he was aware of, and had perhaps even read, my first book, the diary of my time in Downing Street from 1998 to 2001. It seemed a bit unlikely to me, but as a gift I gave him a copy of my second book on British prime ministers and their relationship to the media. He told me he didn’t really read books any more, which was a little disheartening, although his staff quickly interjected to point out that he read a lot of articles and other material online. I wasn’t to be left with the impression that the prime minister of India wasn’t an intellectual. This was supposed to be a ‘getting to know you’ session but, as I suspected it might, it quickly turned into the first of my interviews for this book. Most politicians grasp any opportunity to talk about themselves, and I had never really expected this to be an occasion for small talk. I soon learned that small talk, like many other things, is something Modi just doesn’t do. Even as we started discussing politics and the election, I did my best to make the most of my first opportunity to size up Modi the man. He is imposing, there is no doubt about that. Like the best of them, he completely dominates the room. His eyes are sharp and penetrating and I found it very hard to look away from him while making notes or checking something I might want to ask. Sitting beside him you have his complete attention and he seems in no hurry to attend to anything else. I had the same experience when left completely alone for ten minutes with Nelson Mandela when he visited the UK to speak at a Labour Party conference, although in Mandela’s case he was more than happy to have a fairly inconsequential chat and I was too in awe to attempt anything else. Modi is physically commanding also. He’s not particularly tall, around 5 feet 7 inches, or 1.70 metres, but he is broad. He once claimed in an election speech to have a 56-inch chest, although I read elsewhere that this is not strictly true, and that ‘fifty-six inches is a very cleverly crafted tool to develop Modi’s alpha male image’. I’m inclined to believe that interpretation, as I was soon to be offered a very large outpouring of image-building observations, many of them from the horse’s mouth. But it didn’t strike me as a great idea to start challenging him on his vital statistics within minutes of meeting him. Modi is always impeccably dressed and takes a lot of trouble over his physical appearance. His grey beard was neatly trimmed and his hair smartly if conventionally cut. He wore one of the long kurta tunics with short sleeves for which he is well-known, white leggings and open-toed sandals. I would discuss his dress sense with him on a later occasion but, right now, he was keen to talk about the book I was hoping to write. Not surprisingly, he had his own opinions about what it ought to contain. ‘The global population should know how we smoothly and effectively managed the world’s largest election process and also how effectively we have evolved the election process since 1952,’ he told me. That was the date of the first post-Independence election, when Jawaharlal Nehru, great grandfather of Modi’s opponent in 2014, Rahul Gandhi, won a massive parliamentary majority and became India’s first democratically elected prime minister. Nehru, like his daughter Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv, was leader of the Indian National Congress, better known just as the Congress party. The man sitting next to me was the first non-Congress politician ever to win an absolute majority without needing the support of coalition parties. His Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, had a much smaller majority than Congress had enjoyed at the peak of its popularity. Nevertheless, as David Cameron pointed out to him on the day the results were announced, he had just got more votes than any other politician anywhere in the universe. What Modi had to say about democracy, life, the universe and everything we will get to in good time. What I most wanted to hear from him on that Saturday morning was that I would be free to write his story and analyse how he had secured his victory with complete independence. I was delighted to have been granted unique access to him in this way, but I had to be clear that there were no strings attached. Having read some of the previous books on him, I had the clear impression that he liked his story to be told his way and his way only. He had clearly anticipated the question, and to his credit he said I could write whatever I liked. ‘You can criticise me as much as you want.’ Modi has reason to be wary of writers and journalists. Few politicians in India have faced such a barrage of personal attacks as he has done since his very first days as a public figure. If it ever got to him, he is well beyond that now. He didn’t always like the questions I asked him during several hours of interviews and he didn’t always answer them. But he was generous with his time, unfailingly courteous and appeared content that I should write as fair an assessment of the man and his campaign as I was able to construct. I’d been warned that he wasn’t very confident speaking in English, but he spoke to me almost entirely in perfectly clear and coherent English, only occasionally reverting to his native Gujarati, which my multi-lingual note-taker was able quickly to translate. I didn’t feel able to take everything he told me at face value and the reader will soon know when I felt I was being spun. If he had indeed seen my first book, The Spin Doctor’s Diary, he should have known that it takes one to know one and that I have a very low spin threshold when it comes to the utterances of politicians. He should also have known that I tend to react very forcefully if any government, even one that I worked for and admired, tries to tell me what I can or cannot write. While I didn’t ask Modi about the holy man on that occasion, he clearly does listen to those who claim to be able to see into his future. He later told me the story of meeting another astrologer not long after his first election as chief minister of his home state of Gujarat in 2002. Why, he asked her, had nobody predicted he would get the job? ‘She responded by saying that her prediction was that God had the prime minister’s position in store for the future. Basically we have a belief in our religion, Maro Bhagya Vidhata, which means I am putting myself at the disposition for what God has in store for me. If this is the case why be afraid? I have never worn a bullet-proof jacket.’ My next visit to Delhi, in August, coincided with Indian Independence Day, my first opportunity to see and hear Modi speak in public. By now plenty of people had told me what an extraordinary orator he was. How he could keep a huge crowd in the grip of his hands through his rhetoric. How his speeches, almost all of which he wrote himself after consulting widely, were delivered without notes but with great precision, weaving the personal and the political, the local and the national, the emotional with the policy content. He spoke in Hindi. It is one strand of his nationalist agenda that Indian languages, pre-eminently Hindi, should be favoured over western languages, especially English. Once I had persuaded the rather officious security personnel that my young researcher, Gaurav, had as much right to be in the VIP enclosure as I did, I was able to get a running commentary of the speech’s highlights. Like the rest of the crowd, we had had to get up early to be there. Open-air occasions like this often happen at the start of the day before the heat becomes too oppressive. So, as the sun gathered in intensity behind the ramparts of Delhi’s historic Red Fort, Narendra Modi took to the podium for his first Independence Day address. Resplendent in a scarlet and green turban and flowing cream robes, he looked out over the tens of thousands of people who had struggled through the early-morning traffic to see him, pausing before he spoke. He knew that just by standing there he was making history. Not only the first PM with an absolute majority not to owe allegiance to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, but also the first man from a lower-caste family born in poverty to lead the nation, and the first to have been born after the country gained its independence. By now world leaders had started to become used to the idea of the pariah turned prime minister. In any case, this speech wasn’t meant for them. At least one attempt had been made on Modi’s life during the election campaign and his bodyguards had good reason to urge him to speak behind protective screens. He refused. He wanted to speak directly to the people with as little as possible to separate him off. And they had never seen or heard anything like it. For my part, while I’ve listened to some great political orators, this was something quite different. The Blairs, Thatchers and Clintons all knew how to woo their audiences. The words of Barack Obama will be quoted for generations to come. But none of them ever engaged a crowd with such fervent, visceral passion as Narendra Modi. If success in politics were just about that, Modi would have no equal in the world today. Politicians can get into trouble when they try to learn their speeches by heart, although the autocue or teleprompter can be a mixed blessing. It was at the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1952 that former President Herbert Hoover introduced the world to the device that puts the speaker’s words on a screen, supposedly invisible to the audience, and is intended to help make the delivery appear more natural. When Hoover strayed off the script the machine froze, throwing him off his stride. ‘This damned thing,’ he was heard to mutter, ‘I could do better without it.’ The teleprompter has never taken off in India, where politicians and the public prefer a bit more passion in their speeches. But on big set-piece occasions, and they don’t get any bigger than Independence Day, Indian prime ministers traditionally read from a lengthy text, written with the help of their civil servants and covering all the main issues confronting the government. Not so Narendra Modi. Everything about his address broke with tradition. He spoke with only a handful of notes in front of him in a language shorn of the usual pomp and grandeur of a formal ceremonial occasion. Where previous prime ministers had talked of India’s greatness, he talked of its shame. The nation could send a mission to Mars but it couldn’t provide a toilet in every school. Poverty and filthy streets disfigured a country that prided itself on one of the most advanced IT sectors in the world. And above all, the degradation of women, whether through the brutality of countless rapes and sexual assaults, or the inhumanity of female foeticide, brought dishonour on all Indians. Nobody was left in any doubt by the end of his hour-long speech that Narendra Modi was a mould-breaker who meant to do things his own way, a way that was a radical break from the past. ‘I am an outsider,’ he told them, ‘quite isolated from the elite class of this place.’ Claiming outsider status is a familiar gambit among political leaders. It is most effective in those places where disillusionment with the status quo is particularly intense. India in 2014 was just such a place. But nobody walks straight into the corridors of power as a complete outsider, however much they might like to pretend they have. Tony Blair and David Cameron went straight in at the top, becoming prime minister in Britain without any previous experience of ministerial office. But they had at least sat in the House of Commons. Modi took on the job without even having been a member of the Indian parliament, the Lok Sabha. He wasn’t exactly an ingénue, however. He was an outsider to Delhi in the sense that Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were outsiders to Washington. He’d governed a large state for twelve years and was no stranger to politics. And Modi’s record in Gujarat, on India’s west coast, was considerably more controversial than those of the former governors of Georgia, Arkansas or Texas. More than a thousand people died in interreligious violence at the start of his watch, a tragedy that came close to ending his career almost as soon as it had begun. So to his many critics, Modi isn’t enough of an outsider. They believe he should have been excluded from political life once and for all. That even George W. Bush should have considered him enough of an extremist to refuse him a visa said all that needed to be said about him for many western liberals. But on the day the results of the general election were announced, 16 May 2014, Modi had the best of all answers to his critics, a decisive victory delivered by the votes of hundreds of millions of Indian citizens, who knew all about his record and had decided nonetheless that he was the man to take the nation forward. Just as I would not have voted for him, I never voted for Margaret Thatcher either. But I couldn’t help but be impressed by the professionalism and effectiveness of her election campaigns. I was on the inside as director of communications when Tony Blair secured his landslide victory in Britain in 2001. On that occasion we fought with every weapon at our disposal. We battered the Conservative Party into submission and we kicked them when they were down in the hope that they would not be able to recover for a very long time to come. So I am not squeamish about aggressive election campaigns. In 2014, Modi did exactly the same to the Congress Party. One of Tony Blair’s former ministers, Patricia Hewitt, who now chairs the UK India Business Council, called it ‘an absolutely model campaign. It had many of the best bits of Blair, Clinton and Obama but with even more modern techniques that even they hadn’t dreamed of.’ Modi picked up some ideas from campaigns in the west but, as he reminded me, India is a very different kind of country. ‘If you take a look at the Tony Blair campaign, it had some very good learnings for us but the scale was much smaller. India is the largest democracy on earth. If you add up the next forty democratic countries you will just about reach the total of the electorate in India. It is this scale that is hard to even imagine.’ Even so, India did inherit the basic structures of its modern parliamentary democracy, and much else besides, from Britain, and that democracy, while far from perfect, has served the country well. As Patrick French, one of the best outside observers of the country, notes, ‘Half the people in the world who live in a democracy live in India, and an Indian general election can be like nothing on earth.’ India may have learned parliamentary politics from the west, but the election of 2014 was not merely home-grown, it was an example to political parties across the world of what a determined leader and a disciplined party can achieve. This was India’s version of Barack Obama’s ‘Yes We Can!’ but amplified a hundred times over. By its use of innovative technology and social media, its ability to reach parts of the country never touched by a national campaign before, and its capacity for galvanising young people and those normally uninterested in or disillusioned by politics, the Modi campaign was a master-class in modern electoral politics. In many ways it was the right campaign at the right time, and under different circumstances it might not have delivered the clear parliamentary majority that it did. The number of people voting for his BJP more than doubled compared to the previous election in 2009, but for all its success the party fell a long way short of getting Modi a simple majority of the votes cast. Candidates running under the colours of the BJP secured 31%. They were aligned with numerous smaller parties in what is called the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Between them they pushed the tally up to almost 39%. The once dominant Congress Party could manage only 19% by itself and 23% when its partners in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) were added in. The first-past-the-post parliamentary system, another hangover from British rule, had served Modi well. The BJP won a higher share of the vote than any single party since 1991, but never before had a 31% tally produced enough MPs to govern alone. Yet Modi was the undisputed winner, and few would argue with the assumption that had it been a genuinely presidential election, rather than a quasi one, he would have won and won handsomely. The New York Times has called an Indian election campaign ‘the greatest show on earth.’ Hillary Clinton described the supervision of the electoral process across a country of almost 1.3 billion people as a global ‘gold standard’. This is not to say that there aren’t problems in administering a poll across almost eight thousand towns and 640,000 villages. Bribery, corruption and vote-rigging are no longer endemic, but nor have they been rooted out altogether. Indian democracy has survived and grown stronger over the years, while in neighbouring countries like China it has never had the chance to take root; in others like Pakistan it has proved to be an extremely fragile plant, all too easily trodden underfoot by the military. As Modi pointed out to me, the eligible electorate in India of 814 million is almost double that of all fifty countries in continental Europe put together (492 million) and comfortably exceeds the combined total for the fifty-six countries in the Americas, north and south, and the Caribbean (645 million). Of those people registered to vote, over 550 million did so in 2014. To achieve a turnout of 66.4% in a country where a quarter of the population live below the poverty line and a similar number can neither read nor write and have little access to the news media is a remarkable achievement in itself. By way of comparison, in the American presidential election of 2012, the figure was 57.5%. Narendra Modi cannot claim all the credit for this impressive turnout, of course. Enormous efforts were made by the Election Commission of India to raise awareness and register voters ahead of the poll. But the ‘Modi Wave’, as it became known, undoubtedly contributed to the enthusiasm with which so many people went to the polls, often queuing for hours in order to cast their ballots. The very high turnout among young, first-time voters was a notable feature of the election. And whether Modi created the wave or rode the wave, or a bit of both, he succeeded in reaching the holy grail that has eluded almost every other political leader of our age by inspiring a whole new generation of younger voters not just to listen to him but to vote for him. One of the many things that makes Modi such a fascinating figure is his ability to weave together and then to articulate so many of India’s contradictions and make them appear consistent; to embrace India’s future, through its young IT-savvy generation, and its past, embodied in the myths and legends of its cultural heritage. He showed how in that Independence Day address. From the ramparts high above the crowd, and with millions watching and listening at home, he was able to expose India’s ugly side while still making Indians feel good about themselves. ‘I strongly believe in the words of legends,’ he told them. ‘I have great faith in the statements made by ascetics, sages and saints.’ He went on to quote from his favourite sage, Swami Vivekananda, ‘I can see before my eyes Mother India awakening once again.’ As he concluded his speech, I could sense that the crowd around me wanted desperately to believe him. But as the former governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, said of all politicians, ‘You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.’ To live up to his promises, Modi now had to show the whole of India and the watching world outside that he had as much of an appetite for the prosaic business of getting things done as he did for the razzamatazz of electioneering. The outsider had come inside and he had to make the system work. As he left the podium at the Red Fort and made his way to the bullet-proof car that was waiting for him, he might have reflected on what had been a momentous twelve months for him personally. A year earlier it was not yet certain that he would even be his party’s candidate for prime minister. He had built up a large and fanatical following at the grass roots, but many party elders worried that he was too divisive a figure, with too controversial a past, to be acceptable to the country as a whole. So intense were the feelings he aroused on both sides that it is impossible to understand how he came to fight such a ground-breaking and ultimately successful campaign, without knowing a little about how he came to be such an emotive figure in Indian politics and how he saw off those who hoped to thwart him. The story of Modi’s rise from humble beginnings to the office of prime minister is, in any case, a fascinating one. It is interwoven with the complex historical and cultural fabric of India of which he, as a nationalist, is so immensely proud. I have done my best to make the story accessible to those outside India who want to understand the man and the political environment in which he operates. I hope Indian readers will bear with me if sometimes my explanations seem obvious or unnecessary. There is nothing more irritating than the tourist who spends all his time comparing what he sees to life back home, but I’m afraid a little of that is essential in explaining the whirlwind that hit India with such force in the months leading up to Modi’s historic victory. While the western media did, of course, report on the campaign, it was covered with none of the minute detail with which American or British elections are dissected. The lasting memories for even a fairly attentive television viewer in the west would have been of a crushing defeat for the Gandhis, a new prime minister who was supposed to be a bit of a right-wing extremist and, oh, wasn’t there something about him selling tea as a boy? A chai wala? Yes, that was it.