India Today’s own Narendra Modi

India Today to Narendra Modi: What about creation of jobs?

Narendra Modi: As for creation of jobs, it has been the topmost priority of my government. All our efforts have been geared to this task.

The above question-answer is from India Today’s latest edition, which is an out and out eulogy to Narendra Modi who is given the Newsmaker of the Year Award by the weekly.

Now let’s look at a news item from India Today’s website: A Romanian flight carrying 276 Indian passengers landed in Mumbai early on Tuesday after being grounded in France four days ago over suspected human trafficking.

It was not human trafficking. It was a whole airplane of people leaving India illegally but voluntarily to find jobs in the USA or Canada or any country better than Modi’s India. Ironically, most of these ‘illegal’ jobseekers are from Modi’s own Gujarat which he claims in the India Today interview as the state made ideal by him. “When I became chief minister of Gujarat in 2001, the size of its economy was around $26 billion (Rs 2.17 lakh crore). When I left Gujarat to become the prime minister, the size of Gujarat’s economy had become $133.5 billion (Rs 11.1 lakh crore).” Modi claims that in the India Today interview. He goes on to make a similar claim about India’s economic progress after he became the PM.

If India is indeed making all that progress which the PM claims in the India Today interview, why are millions of Indians choosing to leave the country and live abroad doing even menial jobs?  Hundreds of thousands of Indians are even giving up their Indian citizenship in order to be able to work abroad. Where is the ‘connect’ between Modi’s claims in the India Today interview and the ground reality in the country?

India Today has chosen Modi as the Newsmaker of the Year. They have dedicated the last issue of the year to Modi. Almost the entire magazine is about Modi. There is a long - very long, in fact - article that lists Modi’s achievements with ample details. The senior journalist of India Today has done a great job to project Modi as “The Reformer,” “The Builder,” “Messiah of the Poor,” “The Vishwa Guru,” “Master Strategist,” and so on. I’m not listing all of the epithets used by India Today, which has put up no less than 24 scintillating photographs of Narendra Modi in this one volume. 

The interview was conducted by India Today’s owners, Aroon Purie and his daughter Kallie Purie. The father and daughter know their business, if not their job. Senior journalist of the magazine, Raj Chengappa, was also part of the interview team. It is he who wrote a long panegyric to Modi as the lead article of the issue. When you read the article and the following interview, it will be clear to you that all questions and answers were ready long before the interview was conducted. Probably the interview was just a chai per charcha and a photo session. Yet another of those well-known Modi gimmicks.

Let Modi keep spending money on propaganda. He will definitely win the next Lok Sabha elections. He will be India’s PM yet again. And India will become a Hindu Rashtra. The minorities in India will suffer the same fate as the minorities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That is, Modi will make another Pakistan of India. We become like our enemies, some writer said. Modi will prove that statement’s veracity yet again. Some silly people will think that history is avenged. A few, very few, intelligent people will know the truth: the masses are easy to be fooled. Endlessly. Magazines like India Today will go on eulogising the ruler even if the party changes, the ideology changes, whatever changes… the Puries just want to laugh all the way to their banks.