23

May

Will the Real Prashant Kishor Please Stand Up?

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Today’s Edition

New Delhi, 23 May 2024

Suranya Aiyar

If Prashant Kishor is indeed a covert operative for the BJP, or rather, for Narendra Modi, then that tells us that we are facing something more than the saga of hatred and vengeance that the Modi Regime has unleashed on us in India; we are facing something more than the sordid tale of foreign hit operations that our intelligence agencies headed by Ajit Doval might have been orchestrating; and we are facing something a lot more sinister and shocking than an ideological and political battle against Hindu Chauvinism with Criminal Characteristics from the Modi Regime.

 

If Prashant Kishor is an agent of the Modi Regime, then we are looking at something akin to a medieval court drama of intrigue, back-stabbing and betrayal of sub-continental proportions. The question is not Prashant Kishor's political beliefs, to which he is entitled, but of pretenses in presenting himself as an independent professional with no connection with the Modi enterprise for India.

Article at a Glance



The article raises suspicions about Prashant Kishor's true intentions and allegiance. It would imply a sinister and shocking conspiracy if he is indeed a covert operative for the BJP or Narendra Modi. Kishor's recent statements and interviews have sparked doubts about his independence and professionalism.

His appeal to Mahatma Gandhi seems shallow, and his reactions to speculation about the BJP's electoral prospects appear defensive and nervous. The article questions why Kishor needs to respond to such speculations and why he brought up Modi's declining popularity only to deny it later.

It also highlights Kishor's negativity towards the Gandhis and Jagan Reddy, which may be more than wounded pride. The article concludes that if these doubts are correct, it would mean a severe conspiracy has infiltrated India's election process for the last ten years, and Kishor must clarify his position.

What first raised doubts about him was not his recent public statements and interviews but his claims a few months ago that he had become a Gandhian and had been walking through villages in Bihar in a Gandhian attempt to build some form of movement or organisation there.

 

It took a lot of work to identify something Gandhian in what Prashant Kishor said. He did not appear to have any deep knowledge of Gandhi's writings or Gandhian thought. It was puzzling that he should appeal to the Mahatma so apparently gratuitously because it is certainly not the case in India that an aspiring politician or social activist needs to invoke Gandhi to establish himself.

 

Going by his rather un-Gandhian demeanour and attitudes, it seemed that perhaps the appeal to Gandhi was merely the branding hack in Prashant Kishor that was impressed by the widespread "name recognition" of Mahatma Gandhi among the common people of Bihar, and perhaps elsewhere in India.

 

But this would merely be another example of the shallowness of our times - lamentable but not outrageous. What casts doubt over Prashant Kishor's true intentions from the start of his decade-long involvement in Indian elections, is his apparent discombobulation in recent days over speculation that the BJP's one-man-Modi-Campaign has bombed, and that it might even have lost them the election.

 

This would be such a spectacular and unlikely electoral upset that if I were a professional political analyst, I would see no reason to respond to such speculations unless and until they came to pass.

 

It is clear that supporters of the INDIA Alliance who are making public statements about an impending Modi-induced defeat of the NDA, are doing so to energise sympathetic members of the public to come out and vote, because their vote might count in what started mere weeks before as Modi's election. This does not mean that this speculation is dishonest, as they have stated why they believe things might be turning against Modi, and hence the NDA. But the question is, why does Prashant Kishor feel the need to respond at all?

 

It is not entirely fair to judge a man based on what he said to a hostile interviewer who was looking to make a splashy headline, as was the case with Prashant Kishor's recent interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire. To give Prashant Kishor the benefit of the doubt, it could be the professional in him that is moved to refute what he may assess as inaccurate or biased comments by other political observers. He might even be irritated at being accused of being a BJP stooge just because he does not agree with those who believe the NDA will see a big upset in this election.

 

But the arguments that he is making and the emotions that he is expressing would appear to bely this. In his recent interview with Karan Thapar, I was with Prashant Kishor so long as he was saying that he does not see a Modi loss because the public dissatisfaction that anti-Modi commentators are now seeing has always been there, and will not convert into a significant loss of seats (which he describes as an above-50-seat loss). I was with him when he was saying that Modi always cast slurs at Muslims in every election, and his doing so this time did not indicate nervousness in the PM about the elections (even though one could not help noting that this was a very strange attitude in a self-proclaimed Gandhian).

 

But when he equated Sonia Gandhi's "maut ka saudagar" phrase for Modi with Modi's recent abusive words about Muslims; and when he said that making communal statements as Modi's recent ones was part of anyone's democratic right, one began to wonder exactly where Prashant Kishor stood.

 

And one began to have grave apprehensions about Prashant Kishor's motivation for speaking now, at this point in the election when Modi has put his own public image into free fall in an election that he chose to make all about his personal standing, to affirm a BJP win with, as Kishor said, the same or more seats than last time, when Kishor lost his temper when Karan Thapar asked him if he believed that Modi's popularity had suffered a severe decline based on Prashant Kishor's own earlier, unsolicited and volunteered information that social media views on Modi's interviews were steeply down from earlier times, and that there was a decline in the intensity of public enthusiasm for Modi.

 

If it is Prashant Kishor's professional assessment that Modi's "baseline" (to use his own pet phrase) popularity was so high that the present decline in public support will not reflect in lost seats, then why did he have to bring it up at all in a discussion about the election outcome? And why did he then lose his temper when Karan Thapar phrased him as having said that Modi has suffered a severe decline in popularity?

 

Why did Prashant Kishor not want to be quoted as saying that Modi had lost popularity when this was precisely what he had just said? He had put it in strong language himself, saying that there was a decline in the intensity of public support for Modi.

 

What is significant here is not what Kishor actually believes about Modi's popularity but why he brought it up earlier in the interview in the first place. It looks a lot as though he did so to give the appearance of being neutral and objective. Of drawing people into believing that he was "one of us" in so far as he was dispassionately assessing the election scene, and that in this spirit he could also say something negative about Modi. And this is where it would appear, still giving Kishor the benefit of the doubt, the deception may lie.

 

Owing to long familiarity with the Congress Party's signature style of unceremoniously slamming the door on people working closely with it, one has tended to dismiss Prashant Kishor's negativity about the Gandhis as the bad feelings of yet another victim of the occupational hazard of being associated with the Grand Old Party. But now one wonders whether there was something a lot more than wounded pride in Kishor's negativity about Rahul Gandhi.

 

And, also, come to think of it, if there was something more than hard feelings against Jagan Reddy, the incumbent Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, with whom he is said to have had a falling-out last year, in Prashant Kishor's loud and insistent statements in Andhra Pradesh in the last fortnight that Reddy is going to lose.

 

Prashant Kishor told Thapar in the interview that he had been silent till the fifth phase of the election on May 20th as it would not have been right to speak about its outcome while the vote was ongoing, and he is speaking now as only a minority of seats are left to be voted upon in the subsequent two phases of the election. This rather glosses over the impact of the vote in the coming two phases, but, more importantly, it is contradicted by the fact that Prashant Kishor has been, from before the vote in Andhra Pradesh on May 13th, which was only the fourth phase of the election, aggressively dissing Jagan Reddy's prospects in this election.

 

Jagan Reddy has reportedly filed a case against Prashant Kishor for releasing an opinion poll the day before the May 13th vote in Andhra Pradesh. I wondered then, as I had earlier in March, when he sharply criticised Jagan Reddy's welfare schemes in Andhra Pradesh, why Prashant Kishor was going head-to-head with a political leader at such a sensitive time. He was not a welfare expert, which did not fit his image as a professional election analyst.

 

Kishor insisted with Karan Thapar that a loss to the BJP of even up to 50 seats can be made up for and even exceeded in seats won in West Bengal, Assam, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.  He says Tamil Nadu and Kerala will add only 3 or 4 seats to the BJP kitty. So, is he banking on Andhra Pradesh for a significant part of the balance?

 

Why did he suddenly appear there, after several weeks of silence when everyone else had started talking about Modi axing his own foot in North India? Was he there as an observer or a campaigner? He is rumoured to be advising Reddy's opponent and NDA ally Chandrababu Naidu. The question is, why the secrecy?

 

Once you wear the lens of scepticism, changes in Prashant Kishor's language before and after he lost his poise in the interview look more and more suspicious. He begins by speaking of a decline in voter turnout as being thought of by "some", as in third parties, as owing to complacency, and not a decline in support for Modi. But after he was disconcerted by the prospect of being quoted on the decline in Modi's popularity, he repeated this as his own belief. Was the earlier choice of the third person innocent, or does it reveal to us how a very cunning public relations project has been operating around us for years in full knowledge of what precise choice of words and public expressions it takes to lull suspicions and hide sordid politics in plain sight?

 

At one point in the interview, Prashant Kishor agrees with what anti-Modi propagandists are saying - that price rise and unemployment are issues that the public has been expressing dissatisfaction with for a long time. He says that "dissent" in India is very much alive.

 

"Dissent" is a curious word choice for informal public complaints, as opposed to organised civil society or party-political opposition to the Government. Was Kishor attempting to address Thapar's Indian and foreign left-wing audience on the allegations of the repression of dissent in India by the Modi Regime while at the same time looking as though he cared about dissent?

 

If these doubts about Prashant Kishor are correct, then we are looking at a serious conspiracy that led to the infiltration of several leading non-BJP political parties, and the entire election process in India, for the last ten years at the behest of and for the benefit of the BJP, which is today to be acting at the behest of and for the benefit of Narendra Modi.

 

Prashant Kishor has been an invited confidante and given a seat at the heart of some of the biggest anti-Modi parties and forces in the nation....for ten years! For ten years, we have believed that he was not an agent of the Modi Regime while engaging with him and including him in politically defeating Modi.

 

Have we been fooled? Prashant Kishor must clarify.

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Author Introduction: Suranya Aiyar is a lawyer, activist and writer. She runs the blog thinkindiasabha.blogspot.com

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