Sunday, July 21, 2013

Modi's Media Machine


Jatin Gandhi unearths a lot of details on Narendra Modi's PR operations. In the section on a "Request for Proposal" issued by the Gujarat government to recruit a PR agency, Gandhi writes:

The devil is concealed in the details of objectives such as this: ‘Crisis perception management and informing the Commissionerate of Information about impending stories about Gujarat State / leadership.’ In effect, an industry insider reveals, this is where the dirty work comes in. The ‘leadership’ clearly refers to Modi. From slowly working on journalists and feeding them stories, and, in some cases, doling out advertisements to their employers, the state government does it all. ‘Crisis perception management’ essentially kicks in at times when Modi goofs up an interview with remarks like the recent one he made to Reuters about a puppy under his car’s wheel. Or when he told The Wall Street Journal in June 2012 that malnutrition among children under five was explained by middle-class girls in Gujarat being “more figure conscious than health conscious”.

The Request document clearly demands that the agency’s officials ‘monitor the presence of, and discussions about, brand Gujarat in social and political circles…This can be achieved through, among other activities, continuously monitoring and tracking all national and regional newspapers, magazines, TV channels, the inter-web, blogs and other channels of external communication at regular intervals.’

1 Comments:

  1. Ramesh Narendrarai Desai said...

    A regular industry appears to have come up to counter Narendra Modi. I have no objection to it. i think that it is fair to find out loopholes in anyone's presentation. My only objection is that the criticism is not a balanced one. One should also point out the positivities in the presentations of Modi. His emphasis on good governance is underplayed. Good governance can take care of half of India's problems. Policies, can become effective. Politicians would become more credible if empowered Babus actually deliver what the Netas promise. In the rest of India, Netas speak one language, Babus' actions another. The public gets bewildered. Modi speaks one language, his Babus deliver the same. His policy of assisting the corporate sector pays dividends by creating jobs, thus taking the burden away from the Government's shoulders. Good governance, emphasis on the sector that delivers, steering clear of the public versus private sector, emphasis on development of infrastructure, training of manpower for the jobs being created, making the Babus to deliver good service to the people instead of ruling over them, are taking the state of Gujarat and the country ahead in the direction of increased democracy. There is no point in declaring grand policies that you can not implement. It is better to declare only those policies that you can actually carry out. It is better to satisfy the public at large than to satisfy mere theoreticians.