Lance price talks about the election of indian Prime Minister noranda modi and his plans for the country. Mr. Price was given exclusive access to modi and his top advisers for the book next on booktv. [inaudible conversations] good afternoon everyone. My name is Michael Coble man. Good afternoon. Im the senior associate for south asia with the Wilson Centers asia program. Thank you for coming to todays discussion about Narendra Modi and the election that brought him to power. Both the modi effect and lesser selection made branches to debate. The modi effect is an accomplished opiate controversial politician and while he is gotten tremendous attention since becoming Prime Minister last year there is much we dont know about him especially because he has given relatively few interviews. As for the election was the largest and longest in indias history comprising 800 million eligible voters occurring over a fiveweek period that began about one year ago. Our discussion today will revolve around a new book on modi and the Election Campaign that is generated a fair amount of those. The modi effect inside Narendra Modis campaign to transform india. The book is significant part based on interviews that the author had with modi and his top campaign advisers. Lance price was given exclusive access to speak with him. We are very fortunate to have lance price with us today who will talk about the book and its ideas in detail. Lance is a writer and political commentator who reports reiterate from london for the cbs news show uptotheminute. He is also journalists at the bbc and he also has been media adviser to british Prime Ministers tony blair. The format will be essentially as follows. First i will post a series of questions to lance and we will have a conversation for 20 or 25 minutes or so. We will give an opportunity to our commentator to offer some brief reactions. Many of you in the room know him. He is the u. S. Correspondent for the hindu when its hot indias top englishlanguage newspapers. He has a ph. D. From lse and has written a book on poverty in india. Finally before we get started i just wanted to note that for those of you who would like to live tweet us at and we encourage that and those of you in this room are those of you watching on live web stream please use the hashtag modi. With that lets go ahead and get started. Lance we will start with a question is more about you and about modi. You were given exclusive access to interview three and his advisers and you were told he would have the freedom to write the story is you found him. He is not granted all that many extended interviews about himself and the campaign so the question is why do you think modi granted you foreign journalists have had no major prior connections to him with his exclusive access in this privilege to talk to him and interview him and tell the story . Thank you michael and thanks for the introduction. As a question that i was asked when i was in delhi recently for the publication and one of the first questions that all the indian journalist asked was why you would not ask lexi hasnt made himself available to indian journalist. As as i detail in the book he didnt make himself available to indian journalist much during the campaign either which is something we can perhaps talk about later on and the way in which he related to the media about his own perspective. Why me . I dont have a definitive answer to that question. I think there are two bits of thinking in his own mind in one around him. One was that he wanted someone from outside of india to do a book because they felt although clearly itd been a huge event in india generally it hadnt been widely recognized outside of the country. I followed it turns up late to the media but i was very conscious that certainly in britain you have your elections here in the states every single tiny happenstance is covered in the british media. Its ridiculous. He was an election the largest democracy in the world. Warmer british colony somewhere where we have strong links and lots of indian People Living in britain. And i got a little coverage here and there but not very much. I think they felt that they would like their campaign which they were proud of to be recognized outside of india with some of the triumphs and campaigns that we talk about more regularly. I think the other reason was that i came after with a relatively fresh pair of eyes. Most people in india and you will know better than me most people have made up their minds. Either they are very much in favor of him are very much against him. I think they wanted to his someone to come and can be more unbiased about it. Although he knew i came from a different political introduction. I worked for tony blair and ive been at the centerleft politics. He is happy to be described as a rightwing politician hindu nationalists. Some people describe him in and less flattering terms as you well know. Perhaps the last ingredient that helps me set the security interview was that he had read one of the diary site published about working for layer government at the highest level so i guess those three factors came together to give me the opportunity. Tell us a bit about your impressions of modi starting with your very first initial impressions. You lay this out in the first two pages of the book but talk a bit about what you thought of him after that and then also not just initial impressions that the impressions that informed as you talk more and more. In addition the interviews that you had with modi were about the campaign, about the election but they also as i recall from the book word covering other things as well. Take a few minutes to tell us about some of the things he seemed to like to talk about the most of what he seemed to avoid to talk about, specifically did he open up at all on the issue of the riots in 2002 and for the sake of our audience in washington did he offer any thoughts about the United States and about his view of u. S. India relationships . Well i found meeting him i dont want to brag but i have met a few Prime Ministers and president s in the course of my career. Having worked with player i have obviously been in the company of some interesting people including bill clinton here in washington. So im not fazed by meeting Prime Ministers. He is an extraordinary man and it very very enigmatic man. Office has spent five hours with them altogether in terms of interviews and i have seen him since the book came out. Throughout all of that time i was meeting so. The politician, modi but man he was presenting himself talking about his campaign answering my questions with varying degrees of brightness depending on what it was. I dont think at the end of all that time i can tell you much about modi the man. Im not sure how many people get to meet modi demand. He is a 24 7 politician like no other that ive ever encountered. He works from five up in the morning and he told me he wakes up at 5 in the morning and then for five minutes is connected to the internet and reading the latest news. He works all the way through until he goes to bed usually at midnight. He never takes a day off, never takes a vacation. He doesnt have a wife. He doesnt watch sports doesnt watch television or part of sports games. He just works and i expressed some surprise at that because our politicians like their vacations. They need to relax and have their family time in order to deal with the pressures and so on. One indian fred and said to me remember in india a lot of people have to work from the second they wake up until the moment they go to bed and he is like many indians in that respect. But the one area in his personal life that he talked about was that he sets aside time for spiritual activities every day for meditation which is clearly very important. Sometimes there is quite high tension like when the Election Results are coming in. The media in india were reporting that he was at home watching on television television. That wasnt true at all. He had the door shut and they staff were told they were not to disturb him. He was intercepted and meditating and doing whatever he does is part of the spiritual activities. Very reluctant to talk about family, personal stuff. There was one occasion during the Election Campaign, a huge rally when bombs went off in six people were killed. He decided it should go ahead anyway despite his own staff and security people all saying he should cancel. He said i have a duty to do this and im going to go ahead. It occurred to me while he was telling the story may be if you had a wife and family you would have thought more about first the security. It was the one time during the whole time during the polls he didnt have an immediate answer ready. He said after a few seconds how can i answer that question . I dont know. Another few seconds and he said but i do have a mother that you have brothers. Hes very uncomfortable about opening up personally in that respect. The riots and the terrible attack on the train and the riots that followed in 2002 was one area that is i rather expected because obviously ive read in the experiences of interviewing him and so on was one area that it goes down very quickly. He has talked about in the past and i cover it i hope sufficiently in the book. Most of that is from what he said previously. To me he just said, basically is that ive said enough about that. You can read the report that was put together by the Investigation Team in india. You can read the conclusions and thats all i have to say. It was pretty clear i wasnt going to get any further with that. So i said that was fair enough. I didnt say was my job to reinvestigate. I was there to write a book about the campaign but i had to explain in detail for people outside of india who werent so familiar with what happened but also it had some impact on the campaign. It had an impact on him its candidate and whether not he was a controversial candidate. That was one area. On america he was remarkably forgiving if that is the right word. I think diplomatically its fair to say that the United States was fairly slow to read met him to the fold compared to my country britain nor the European Union or some of the other countries around the world. He just said i didnt allow it to affect munich is allowed to affect my ego. It was pretty clear he wanted to have the relationship to use that famous word reset and he wanted to do the head. I spoke to him after he had been here with a huge reception in Madison Square garden in central park and speaking here in washington as well. Visiting the present and so on and so forth. It meant a lot to him principally because he needs hes not that and what you think of him as a politician but he recognized in any of the United States is going to achieve particularly the economic goals that he has set for his country. When i think about hallow grams i think of Michael Jackson at the Billboard Music awards as a hologram and not indian politicians. If you could talk about this motion how he was able to reach more offer the indian people than had ever been done before in an election, particularly in terms of how the campaign was structured and the tools that were used, that allowed him to reach so many people. One of the interesting things about the campaign, i think is that it was both very Old Fashioned and very modern, and the Old Fashioned pit was the rallies, and i think in america certainly in britain, people are very reluctant to go to Public Meetings anymore. The board voter doesnt get engaged with Public Meetings. That was politics of the mid20th century more than it is today. And he revived that. I think that is starting to happen in india as well. People not engaged in politics and modi took his road show out and they flocked to him to see him. He was Michael Jackson on tour. And with or without the hologram. And 0 so that was interesting actually. That some of the Old Fashioned style of politics has been revitalized by his campaign and another aspect of the campaign which never occurred to me, wasnt deployed in india until this campaign, was going out and knocking on peoples doors. We think doorstep political work is the key to success in a lot of tightly fought races and so it is. And whereas even in parts of india it seems the tradition of going and knocking on peoples doors and saying, will you vote for us, and then make sure they have wasnt something that had been particularly familiar. So something kind of Old Fashioned to us. They seemed to have come to rather late but which modi did use to great effect with the help of the rss people are familiar with the rss and his own Party Workers to make that very effective. The other side of it was a very, very modern campaign. So he looked at obamas Online Campaign look at Online Campaigning in britain and australia and elsewhere and he actually thought we can do better than that. I think he did do better than that. I say that because he allowed the allowed social media to do what it does boss, which is he didnt try to control it. And we have a British Election just got underway back home, which im about to go back and start commenting on and covering. Every day on my phone i get messages tweets, i get texts and so on, from the main parties and i press the delete button as soon as they appear. I know full well theyre just an extension of the crucial Party Propaganda i have already seen and already read and theyre boring. In india it wasnt boring. It was lively and interesting. He managed to throw out stories that kept going kept the debate going and this ecosystem the bit of the ecosystem looking after social media wasnt really being theres a bit of it being done by the bjp put a lot was done by people never been involved in politics before. Young kids who were enthewed by the whole thing. A lot of the enthused by modi and what he was saying and also just enthuses by being part of this and being given the opportunity to show what they could do. And its interesting that gandhi who is 20 years younger than modi was offered the same sort of thing and by some outside entrepreneurs who went to him first. Thought he is a young guy might be Prime Minister. Gandhi said no. Politics in india isnt done like that. And modi took completely different view. Even though Internet Penetration in india is not as extensive as it is here, its growing all the time. A lot of kids have got smartphones and even if not everybody could get access to what was being said on social media, word of mouth did the rest. So if younger people were picking up stuff on social mode ya. Thats go home to villages and towns and tell everybody else. And it spread. So he very, very effectively in my view, used social media and also used social media brilliantly to more or less force the traditional media to dance to his tune. And i was a spin doctor for tony blair. Communications director for the labour party to put it more formally. Even with a good candidate to get the media to do it tell the story your way. Modes diwas remarkably successful in get think Mainstream Media to tell the story his way partly by rationing his vault to them. He didnt do sitdown tv interviews until very late in the campaigndidnt give them to the englishspeaking media until actually most people already voted. He said to them, im going to set the agenda, youre not. You can write about what i say at my rallies what i tweet put on social media but if you want to talk to me youngs have to wait until im ready for you. That was surprisingly effective. So good Old Fashioned doorstep campaigning on the road, and just quickly on the holograms for those who arent familiar, its an enormous country and its impossible for anyone to decide around to all of it. But there were parts described as dark villages and most people dont have television, dont have access to the media in some sense that urban areas would do. And not across the spire country. That would have been impossible. But in electorally significant areas, in the big states he would send out trucks, massive flat back trucks with satellite equipment, generators and everything necessary in order to beam himself live into the Market Square on hologram, and he would be back home at hickam pain headquarters, and up to 100 different places simultaneously would see him and he would answer questions from these places as well. And they used to they even set up a little fan because for a start just having this guy beam bead just something out of star trek. Imagine what an electrifying impact that would have in many places. But they set up a huge fan so his hair would move because they thought people wouldnt it was too static when they did rehearsals and thought people might not think it was the real him. Lets fast forward to the post election environment. The book covers the Election Campaign and the election and also the aftermath. So the bjp moved modes dis party, continue to ride on its election victory momentum for a number of months after the election. Won a series of key state elections. Four are however in february of this year the bjb lost the eflex new new dehli. Which campaigns on clean water Clean Electricity less corruption as well, and you covered this, in your back, which is impressive given this happened in february. Your book was published a few weeks ago. You covered this election setback for the bjp. So the question here is, what do you think that this setback for the bjp and this new dehli state election tells us about the bj and its strategy . Does its suggest that despite all the fancy hocuspocus and technology you have describe, that at the end of t