Cometh the hour, cometh the man” is a popular saying. But given the sudden flood of books on Narendra Modi, it could well be “Cometh the man, cometh the book”.
Modi, who hopes to catapult himself from Vibrant Gujarat to Lutyens’ Delhi, tapping into a nation’s collective yearning for strong leadership, couldn’t have planned it better himself.
Kingshuk Nag’s The NaMo story: A Political Life, however, is probably the least hagiographic of the many tomes on Modi thus far.
The obsessive figure that Nag paints, as he tears apart Modi’s assiduously cultivated veneer, is not quite the messiah that the BJP prime ministerial front-runner would like the world to see.
I mean, a Modi who has a line of Modi kurtas and loves Ray-Ban sunglasses!

Nag’s stolid political commentary puts meat on the bones of the storied rise of a fringe Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) pracharak, from relative obscurity to the uber-strategist. Modi took a leaf out of Lal Krishna Advani’s consolidation of the Hindu vote, and gave it his own imprimatur — his vote-winning consolidation of the Hindu vote in Gujarat has won him three consecutive terms as chief minister.
Nag devotes a tedious chapter to the spectacular failure of Modi’s “Sadhbhavna” experiment and how Modi brought big business to Gujarat’s doorstep, playing the Confederation of Indian Industry and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry against each other; persuading even Ratan Tata that he, Modi, was the “good M” as opposed to West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, “the bad M” in the infamous Singur episode.
But it is when Nag trains his spotlight on Gujarat, where Modi’s word is law — where the monitoring of all those who critique him remains deeply intrusive — that the book throws up one of its more troubling chapters.
Soon after Nag’s colleague receives a tip-off from intelligence that he could be attacked, the author, whose coverage of the post-Godhra riots had been unrelenting, receives a call from Modi who, writes Nag, “guffawed”. “What is all this that I am hearing about a life threat to you? Arre, I only told the intelligence to ensure your safety. After all, you are writing so much against the police that I thought that somebody could attack you,” Modi tells Nag.
Is this what critics can expect if and when Modi does ensconce himself in 7, Race Course Road? In India’s rough and tumble, free-wheeling democracy, there will always be many more who carp rather than praise.
Nag’s book, which remains for the most part a reportage of the events of that time, dwells on whether Modi looked the other way or actively egged rioters post-Godhra — the well-documented cover-up, the sidelining of policemen who had the goods on him is all well known. What is new is the portrayal of Modi’s hitherto obscure roots. Nag pulls out little-known vignettes on the “married bachelor”. He talks of a callow but determined Narendra, all of 17, who ran away from his home in dirt-poor Vadnagar in 1967 rather than give in to his parents’ insistence that he consummate his child marriage to Jashodaben Chimanlal; in later years, the subject of frenzied media scrutiny.
He shows us the inner Modi, alone, deliberately friendless, who would rather abandon his child-wife and keep his distance from his mother and his two brothers rather than have children, nephews and nieces who impact on his reputation as Mr Clean; and a man whom the women of Ahmedabad reportedly adore.
Nag tells us of his “ghanchi” (oilmen) antecedents, and how his father also ran a tea shop where Modi helped out as a boy. He writes about how that industriousness paid off when he ran away to Ahmedabad and worked in a similar tea shop until he was befriended by an RSS official who took him under his wing and offered him the warmth of a faux family at the RSS headquarters, where he soon made himself indispensable.
While the book could do with tighter editing, and perhaps a more logical progression, it remains riveting. One of the more fascinating insights into Modi comes from the pages devoted to the enormous debt that Modi owes the Bharatiya Janata Party’s patriarch, L.K. Advani, whom he has steadily sidelined this past year.
Back then, he was “Narendra”, in whom Advani saw a spark and entrusted with organising the first of the many rath yatras that brought the BJP four square into Delhi as a political force to be reckoned with. The “Narendra” whom Advani rewarded with one position after another, nudging him into the circle of power in Delhi; the “Narendra” whom he protected when the rest of the BJP was
baying for his blood for mishandling the Shankarsinh Vaghela-Keshubhai Patel rivalry; and whom Advani sent back to Gujarat from Delhi to pull the BJP’s irons out of the fire, without realising how Modi would reclaim Gujarat for his own.
Now, as Modi prepares for Delhi, he’s doing his best to obliterate his mentor’s name.