The 56-Inch Chest and the Empty Chair

Twelve years, three terms, one and a half billion people, and not a single follow-up question

Let us begin with the inventory, because the inventory is impressive.

Narendra Modi has a 56-inch chest. He told us so himself, back when he was still auditioning, and the measurement has been doing heavy lifting ever since. 

He has filled Wembley and a stadium in Houston.

He has been beamed by hologram into dozens of villages at once, a man so committed to being seen that he learned to be in four places simultaneously before the technology was really ready. 

He once wore a suit with his own name woven repeatedly into the pinstripes, in case anybody in the room lost track of whose suit it was. He has an app. 

He has a stadium named after him, which he inaugurated, presumably while wearing the suit.

He has stared down two nuclear-armed neighbours. He has flattened an opposition, hollowed an election commission, and turned a national broadcaster into a devotional service. Approval ratings sit at seventy per cent like a monsoon cloud with no travel plans.

And in twelve years he has not once been able to sit in a room and let fourteen people with notebooks ask him things.

Twelve years. Zero. You could complete a medical degree, a residency and a fellowship in the time this man has spent not being asked anything. The strongest leader in the democratic world has a documented, decade-long, internationally observed inability to survive the presence of an unscreened human being holding a pen.

The diagnosis

Let us be clear about what we are looking at, because the comedy depends on precision.

This is not a scheduling problem. It is not a media strategy, though people are paid handsomely to call it one. It is a phobia with a press office.

The authoritarian populist has a very specific psychological architecture, and Modi is its cleanest available specimen. He requires the crowd and he cannot tolerate the individual. The crowd is perfect. The crowd roars on cue, arrives by bus, holds the placard the right way up, and has never in recorded history said "sorry, just to follow up on that." A hundred thousand people in a stadium are safer than one tired woman from a wire service, because the crowd is a mirror and the woman is a witness.

Every unscripted question is a small experiment in whether the myth survives contact with a fact, and the man has decided, over twelve years and three terms, that he would rather not run the experiment. Not once. Not on a good day. Not with a comfortable majority and a friendly host and the wind behind him.

There is a word for a person who wants enormous power and no scrutiny, who wants the adoration of millions and the questions of none. Several words, actually, and most of them are shorter than "quintessential Indian politician."

The Auckland masterpiece

Which brings us to Aotearoa, where in July the machinery briefly seized in public and everybody got to see the gears.

Modi arrived in Auckland, the first Indian Prime Minister here in nearly four decades, on the last leg of a three-nation tour. Sky Tower turned tricolour. The stadium filled with a diaspora crowd, which Sky News in Australia had already described, in the previous port, as politics wearing the costume of diplomacy. Trade, investment and education were duly strengthened. Press conferences given across Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand combined: zero.

So a New Zealand journalist, in the plain, faintly bewildered manner of someone raised in a country where the Prime Minister stands in a corridor and gets shouted at on a Tuesday, asked the obvious question. Why has he not done a press conference?

The answer came from Rudrendra Tandon, Secretary (East) at the Ministry of External Affairs, who noted first that the question had a quality of déjà vu. It did. A Norwegian reporter had put the same question to Modi's departing back in Oslo two months earlier and received silence from the Prime Minister and a torrent of abuse from his supporters, which between them constitute the fullest and most honest answer anyone has yet given.

Tandon then said it would not be appropriate for a civil servant to question the Prime Minister's political method, and immediately explained the Prime Minister's political method at length. Modi, he said, is a quintessential Indian politician who has perfected the art of direct contact with the electorate. The Indian voter, he continued, is predominantly rural, and rural folk do not care to be spoken down to, or to be spoken to through intermediaries.

Read that again slowly, because it is one of the great documents of our age.

The reason the Prime Minister of India cannot take a question in Auckland is that a farmer in Bihar finds it condescending. The journalist has been reclassified as an intermediary, a middleman, a toll booth obstructing the sacred highway of direct communication between the leader and the led. Rural India, which was not consulted, has been assigned a preference on its own behalf, in English, in a conference room in the South Pacific, by a senior official explaining for the Prime Minister why the Prime Minister requires nobody to explain things for him.

And of all the props to reach for, they reached for the farmer. The farmer who was lathi-charged. The farmer who was tear-gassed. The farmer who sat on a Delhi highway through a winter and a pandemic for a year, buried his dead at the roadside, and was called a terrorist in the national press for the crime of wanting direct contact with this government. That farmer has now been posthumously enlisted as the reason none of us gets to hear from it.

That is not a defence. That is a hostage video with a Powerpoint.

The permitted interviews

He is not shy of cameras, obviously. Perish the thought. He gives interviews constantly, provided the interviewer is an actor, a devotee, or ideally both, and provided the great questions of state are addressed: how he sleeps, how he sustains his energy, whether he eats a mango whole or in slices.

The Indian public now possesses a world-class understanding of the Prime Minister's stone-fruit technique and almost none of the youth unemployment figures. A billion and a half people have been handed a decade of exclusive access to a man's fruit preferences by a television industry that retrained, en masse, as a backing choir and has been holding the same high note ever since, waiting for someone to signal the end of the song.

Then there is Mann Ki Baat, the monthly radio address, whose title translates as words from the heart and whose format is a conversation in which the other participant is a transistor. No interruptions. No supplementaries. Nobody clears their throat and says, with terrible politeness, Prime Minister, that was not the question. Just the voice, the nation, and the sublime absence of anyone holding a pen.

He demonetised the savings of a billion people at eight in the evening on television and took no questions on it that night, or the next night, or in the eight years since. Vishwaguru, teacher to the world, who has never once sat an exam.

Exhibit: the one time it happened

Twice, really, and both are museum pieces.

May 2019. He walked into a room containing actual press, said a few words, gestured at Amit Shah, and let Shah take the questions. A heavyweight champion strolls to the centre of the ring, waves to the crowd, and sends his manager in to absorb the punches. History calls it a press conference the way it calls the Holy Roman Empire holy.

Washington, June 2023. Standing beside a US president, protocol forced two questions for the entire event, rationed like wartime sugar. A Wall Street Journal correspondent used hers to ask about the treatment of India's Muslims. He replied that democracy is in India's DNA and that his government discriminates against no one. No follow-up was permitted. And then his supporters fell upon the reporter in such volume that the White House had to publicly condemn the harassment of a journalist for asking a question at a press conference, which is, if you think about it, a rather thorough empirical test of the DNA claim.

The man says India does not discriminate, and the sentence cannot survive contact with the reaction to the person who asked.

The cost, briefly, without jokes

Journalists in India have been raided, surveilled, charged under anti-terror law and held for years without trial. Tax officers arrived at the BBC's offices weeks after a documentary he disliked. NewsClick was raided, its editor jailed. Siddique Kappan spent more than two years in prison for driving towards a story about a gang rape. India's press freedom ranking sits around 150th out of 180 countries. V-Dem stopped calling the country a democracy some years ago and started calling it an electoral autocracy, and the people who make that classification are not, whatever the WhatsApp forwards say, a foreign conspiracy.

The absence of the press conference is not a quirk sitting on top of that record. It is the same instinct, wearing a nicer suit.

The defence, and why it fails

The official line in Auckland is also the popular one, and it is worth stating at full strength. The election is the press conference. Nine hundred million voters, every five years, and he keeps passing. Third term. One of the longest-serving Prime Ministers the country has had. Why humour twelve people from Lutyens' Delhi when six hundred million have already ticked the box?

It has a certain brutal appeal, and it contains, quietly, an entire theory of government. Democracy in this account is a thing that happens for six weeks and then goes to sleep, and between polls the citizen's role is to receive. Winning becomes the answer to every question, including the question of why you will not answer questions. Which is convenient, because it also means that anyone who beats an election has purchased permanent immunity from having to explain themselves, and that a mandate is not a job but a gag order issued in the other direction.

Here is the simpler version. A leader who can only be spoken to through a rally, a radio programme and an actor asking about mangoes is not communicating with anyone. He is broadcasting. And a broadcast has no receiver it is obliged to answer.

The word for it

So let us dispense with the diplomatic register, since the Editors Guild has spent a decade using the word "regrettable" and the man has not so much as flinched.

This is cowardice. Extravagant, world-historic, hologram-assisted cowardice. A man who campaigns on the size of his chest and cannot be left alone in a room with a reporter from Kerala. A man who sends fighter jets across a border and cannot take a supplementary about unemployment. A man who has been elected three times by the largest electorate in human history and has never once, in twelve years, allowed a citizen of that electorate to ask him an unapproved question and then ask a second one when the first answer was rubbish.

The smallest room in India is the one that would contain an unscripted question, and it has been locked since 2014.

He can be beamed into fifty villages at once. He can fill Wembley, Houston, Auckland. He can be everywhere on the surface of the earth, in triplicate, in a suit with his name in it.

He simply cannot be in a room where somebody might say "but."

Long may he reign. Just don't put your hand up.