Patrick French is an award-winning historian and political commentator. His books include 'Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division', 'The World Is What It Is' and 'India: A Portrait'.The British prime minister Harold Wilson, a shrewd if reductive strategist, famously said a week is a long time in politics. For him, timing and nimble footwork were everything. In the days since the general election result, Narendra Modi has certainly had his life changed, and been quick on his feet at adapting to his new role. The steely politician showed rare emotion in public, telling his party colleagues tearfully: "
Kya ma ki seva kabhi kripa ho sakti hai? Katai nahin ho sakti hai. Jaise Bharat meri ma hai waise hi BJP bhi meri ma hai." It may have sounded sentimental, but it appeared authentic.
More moving still was Modi's prostration on the steps of Parliament, a symbolic bow to the temple of democracy, and an act that went down well with some of his long-time political opponents. The fact that he had never been into the building before, and was now arriving as prime minister-designate with a broad majority, shows the road he has taken - a journey unparalleled by any other contemporary global leader. The distance he has travelled is perhaps no greater than that of Manmohan Singh, but Singh's route was familiar: the scholarship boy, raised in penury, who is talent-spotted by someone in a position of power, and rapidly elevated. Modi's achievement is different: he is genuinely self-made. His charged emotion on winning office might be compared to Rahul Gandhi's diffident remark back in March: "My becoming or not becoming PM does not matter."
It is striking how little we really know about what sort of prime minister Narendra Modi will be. Most people have firm ideas about him - that he is a visionary who will make India strong, that he is a Fascist who is destroying the Nehruvian consensus, that he is an economic reformer bringing much-needed foreign investment, that he is a 'swarajist' who will protect India's small traders from rapacious foreign companies, and so forth. On international policy, his old 'frenemy' Shankersinh Vaghela, the Congress boss in Gujarat, told me recently that as prime minister Modi would certainly kick out every last American from India; others say that he will warmly embrace the Washington consensus, on both economics and grand strategy.
The truth is: we don't know. If I could make a guess, it would be that the greatest influence on Modi was not his childhood in Vadnagar or his time at the helm as chief minister in Gandhinagar, but his many years in service as an RSS 'full-timer'. He would have had his share of slights and reverses there: spreading the faith for a voluntary organisation, whether you are a Mormon or a Sangh Parivar promoter, requires an extraordinary degree of resilience in the face of hostility and indifference. A full-timer in the RSS goes through the world knowing that for every ardent supporter he meets, there are many others who profoundly mistrust the organisation and its intentions. If this experience did one thing to Narendra Modi, it was to give him a sense of being an outsider, who was utterly unconstrained by convention.
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