Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spent the first month of the year attending a series of meetings with his party leaders, officials and Ministers, trying to get the messaging of his government right. In the past year or so, several controversies have buffeted the government, including the lapse of the land ordinance, the deaths of Mohammad Akhlaque in Dadri and of Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad and the electoral losses in Delhi and Bihar.
“The object of this month-long exercise, which actually began on December 31, has been to get a grip on the narrative which seems to have slipped from our hands,” said a source. On that day, senior bureaucrats, divided into eight sub-groups, had been asked to suggest out-of-the-box ideas on how to implement the government’s flagship programmes.
Scarcely had that exercise ended when the Prime Minister decided to institutionalise a monthly review meeting of his Council of Ministers. According to top sources in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), for the monthly meetings scheduled with the Council of Ministers, the Ministries will be divided into broadly three categories — Agriculture and related sectors, infrastructure-related sectors and social and core sectors.
“Departments in the big four Ministries of Finance, Defence, Home and External Affairs will be discussed if only they have concern in any of these three areas,” said an official in the Prime Minister’s Office. “Projects will be taken as implemented only after activities start on the ground.”
At the first such meeting with the Council of Ministers on January 27, senior Ministers like Ananth Kumar pointed out that Cabinet decisions took time to fructify. Mr. Modi responded that decisions could not be held up as achievements till some tangibles were present on the ground.
If his meetings with his Ministers were tough, the one with party office-bearers before that was tougher in terms of home truths. At a three-hour sit-down dinner, the Prime Minister asked for suggestions from party members on how to counter the Opposition attacks. One office-bearer said there were not enough party men in corporations and other government bodies as the government was sitting on appointments. Mr. Modi pointed out that there were 700 such appointments that he had not bothered with when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat. “Appointments can create their own problems,” he said.
When he met the eight official morchas or cells of the BJP, the only morcha he asked to send its recommendations in writing was the newly constituted Other Backward Classes cell, which asked for the application of the Karpoori Thakur formula of quotas within quota so that non-Yadav OBCs could avail themselves of reservation in government jobs.
It’s clear that the Prime Minister is scouting for ideas and assessing the strength of his team to break the messaging logjam. As the government heads to the halfway mark of its tenure in December 2016, he hopes to recoup some of the lost propaganda ground.
